‘Are you a spanker?’ It’s been a week of kinky requests
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Version 0 of 1. It was kinky week. First there was an approach from a man who likes to wear adult-size nappies and be treated as a baby by his lover. (My eyebrows disappeared into my fringe.) The second message was a one-liner from a man in his mid-50s in a Panama hat, his name an obvious alias, asking if I’d talk to him on Instant Messenger. He said he couldn’t tell me his name as he was rather well known. “Actor? Politician?” “Might be one of those.” He confessed that it wasn’t his photograph, either, and I told him that I don’t talk to men who need to stay in disguise. “No names, no pack drill,” he replied. “Don’t be a sourpuss. Let’s have a fun conversation on Instant Messenger.” “Not tonight, I’m too tired, but write to me, write me a letter,” I told him. “Don’t be afraid,” he messaged back. “I just want to talk to you. Five minutes. What’s the worst that could happen?” It was a good question. What was there to lose? The box opened on the screen, ready for him to type and for me to reply in real time, the cursor pulsing. “Good to talk to you,” he wrote. “Is this your first time? Instant Messenger virgin?” “No. But I don’t much like it.” “Does it make you feel bad and dirty?” “It didn’t until now.” There was a long pause before he replied. “You’re funny. What else are you apart from funny? Are you a naughty girl?” His light came and went, showing he was leaving and then rejoining the conversation. He was talking to more than one of us at once. “Are you a naughty girl who needs a little punishment?” “Don’t understand,” I wrote, though I had a pretty good idea. After a much longer pause he typed: “I have a hairbrush here. Bend over and take your knickers off. I’m going to use it on you, because you are bad.” “This isn’t my thing,” I told him. “Bye. Good luck. Bye.” Then there was Clive. Clive also wanted to go straight to Instant Messenger, without even saying hello. This time I was armed. “Are you a spanker?” was my first question. He said he wasn’t, but he was sexually dominant and looking for a woman willing to explore passivity in bed. Now, that’s not my thing. I don’t think so, at least. I went to his profile page and found it was unlike any other I’d seen so far. Clive was an aristo-kink. He’d done that whole public school/Oxford/the army/City thing, inherited, and no longer had an alarm clock. His photograph showed him on a fine horse. I went back to the message box and asked how he spent the days. He said he was lucky in so far as he didn’t need to work, aside from managing the estate. Otherwise he spent his life travelling and writing and painting, but had to admit that since his wife died, he was lonely. Thinking back to how I replied to this, I’m deeply embarrassed. I more or less advocated myself as a suitable wife for a baronet. I may even have said how much I felt at home in National Trust houses. He asked if we could have Instant Messenger sex. It would work by each of us writing what we were doing to the other, reported in real time, to create a scenario. He was going to be the lord, and I’d be a servant girl. Evidently he was going to get off on this. I, on the other hand, was getting off the internet. I politely declined and wished him well. It was only afterwards that I wondered what evidence did I have that Clive was Clive? It’s possible that I wasn’t talking to the man I thought I was. He could have downloaded that photograph from anywhere; he could have been 100% a fake. He could’ve be anybody, an unpleasant man, an abuser, a criminal: who knows? It’s more likely than not that he adopts a gentrified persona so as to enact dominance fantasies with women online, women he has no intention ever of meeting. I was gullible, and I was a snob, and I felt like an idiot. Never again. • Stella Grey is a pseudonym @GreyStellaGrey |