I stewed for three days, but I wasn’t sure why exactly I was angry. D hadn’t actually disregarded my boundaries or tried to pressure me into anything I didn’t want. And despite the claims he’d made on his profile, I’d played with doms way rougher and more demanding than he was.
When I was eighteen, I’d hooked up with a guy who’d had a very private backyard—wooden fence, hedges, no neighbors directly behind him. He had put a glory hole in the fence, in a little hedged alcove, and twice I’d gone to his backyard, where he was waiting for me with his giant cock sticking through the hole in the fence. I’d suck him off and leave. I never saw his face, but he’d mutter through the fence, stuff like, “Take it boy,” and, “Suck me, you little cum whore.” On my third visit, I wasn’t in the right mood or something. I felt weird about the things he was calling me, and I wasn’t turned on. I just wanted to go home. So I stopped sucking him and stood. Started to apologize. And he’d said, “If you walk away now, I’ll kill you.”
He’d sounded dead serious. Part of me knew it was ridiculous—he was behind a fence, presumably naked or partly so. If I ran, I could be back at my car before he was even out of the yard. But my imagination had gotten the better of me. I’d imagined he had a gun pressed against the boards, ready to blow my brains out. Or that he’d had plenty of practice pulling his pants up and vaulting the fence in two seconds flat to attack little cum whores who didn’t finish blowing him.
So I got back on my knees and sucked him until he came. Afterward, he’d let me go without a word.
He was still on Fetmatch. He’d Liked one of my pictures last month.
That was kind of fucked up, wasn’t it? Not as fucked up as an actual murderer like Bill Henson getting to remain a member of Riddle. But still pretty fucked up. Like, maybe that was just Glory Hole’s thing—the threats, the name-calling. Maybe lots of guys got off on it. But it wasn’t something he’d warned me he was going to do, and it had scared the shit out of me.
But I still jerked off sometimes to the memory.
So what was I supposed to do about the fact that some of the things that seemed the most dangerous or cruel or terrifying about the lifestyle were often the most exciting?
Two years ago, Fetmatch had put a policy in place to prevent members from using the site to make rape or abuse allegations against other members. A few months after that, a group on Fet had petitioned the site to change its policy and allow victims of abuse to publicly call out their abusers—at least by screen name. They’d used Bill and Hal as an example of a tragedy that might have been stopped if there were a forum where members could identify dangerous players in their communities.
The debate surrounding it had been ugly. For every person who signed the petition and asked Fetmatch to stop silencing victims, someone else argued that finger-pointing was a “slippery slope” and was “just going to lead to drama.” Fet had issued a public statement explaining that, as a social media site, it could not be responsible for hosting confrontations between alleged victims and their alleged attackers. We offer resources for those in need, the site said, but the best way to stop a criminal from striking again is to report the crime to the police.
A sub named Maya had been one of the most vocal petitioners. She’d written countless posts about why victims were often unable to go to the police, and why it was important for submissives to be able to warn one another about predators in the community. She’d argued with commenters who said things like If it was real rape, the victim would go to the police and If you don’t feel comfortable taking legal action against your attacker, you have no business calling them out here. But in the end, she’d had to give up the fight. Fet wasn’t going to change. Doms like Bill and Glory Hole were going to get away with whatever they wanted to do or say. And subs like me were going to enable them by putting up with it.
I had to stop. Had to quit playing with arrogant pricks.
So on my third day of being angry at D and being horny and wanting to punch him but also apologize to him and just generally not understanding what the fuck was going on in my head . . . I had an idea.
A crazy idea.
But one that just might work.
“Thank you all for being here today.” I looked across the table at Miles, Kamen, and Gould. I’d made them all sit on the same side, so they looked like a panel of judges at a pie contest. “I have something important to show you.”
Miles adjusted his glasses. “If it’s porn, please don’t bother. I can’t stand another reminder of how not-laid I’m getting.” Miles’s cardigan today was dark blue and oversized.
“Nice sweater.” I nodded at it. “Neighbor Aber been by lately, or . . .?”
“I am in no mood for your sartorial appraisals, David.”
“So is it porn?” Kamen sounded excited.
“Better.” I turned my laptop screen to face them. “Behold.”
“‘The Subs Club,’” Gould read off the top of the page. I leaned over the screen to read with them. The blog was done in a tasteful beige and hunter theme. Right now it only had one follower—me—but that was about to change.
“What is this?” Miles looked up at me.
“It’s our new blog. We’re going to use it to get people talking about doms.”
Gould frowned. “Doms?”
“Yeah. Like about what makes doms either good or shitty. We can talk about our own experiences, invite other subs to share theirs, and, like, start a dialogue about what doms need to do in order to not be assholes.” I checked the screen again. “And we don’t really have to call it the Subs Club. That was just a lame placeholder title I put in.”
Kamen crossed his arms on the table. “It makes me want a sandwich.”
None of them seemed to be jumping on board.
Gould squinted. “Did you do this in WordPress?”
“Yeah.” I tilted the screen so he could see it better. “Ricky helped.”
“It looks nice.”
“Thanks.”
Miles tapped the table with his finger. “You know, this is a very interesting idea.”
“I know.” I nudged him. “And you’d be really good at it. You love writing and thinking and stuff.”
“And I actually like ‘the Subs Club’ as a name.”
Kamen nodded. “We’re like the Baby-Sitters Club. Except instead of babysitting, we’re face-sitting.”
“Kamen, gross,” I said. “Now I’ll never be able to read the Baby-Sitters Club books the same way again.”
Gould glanced at me. “Do you still read the Baby-Sitters Club books?”
I cleared my throat. “Moving on. All of us need to come up with usernames, to protect our privacy. We can invite subs we know to become members of the blog, and they’ll be able to comment and submit posts. It’ll be a private blog. That way, submissives have a safe place to talk about, like, if a dom abused them or whatever. Basically, everything Fetmatch won’t let us discuss, we’ll discuss here.”
Miles did not look pleased. “Are we equipped to mediate that sort of discussion?”
“Why not?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Remember the last time we tried to have a group blog?”
“You mean the Log Blog?” The four of us had once started an ill-fated blog where we posted pictures of noteworthy shits we’d taken. We’d developed quite the rabid fan base on Reddit before we took it down.
“Yeaaaaahhh!” Kamen slapped the table. “The Log Blog!”
I made a face. “We were super immature back then.”
“It was two years ago,” Gould pointed out.
“Exactly. Now we’re all grown up and ready to have a serious adult blog.”
Kamen leaned back, stretched, and scratched his chest. “My shits were the best, right?”
Miles rolled his eyes. “Kamen, yours defied the laws of nature, and everybody in this room thought you should see a doctor.”
Kamen turned to Miles and offered his hand for a high five, but Miles didn’t return it, and Kamen slowly put his hand down. “Gould never even participated,” he muttered, rocking his chair back on its hind legs.
“Because I don’t feel like sharing my bowel movements with the internet,” Gould said.
“It was anonymous!”
Gould was easily embarrassed, especially by bodily functions. I’d known the guy for years and had yet to hear him fart.
“So what do you think?” I moved my laptop from side to side, letting everyone take a good look at the screen. “The Subs Club. Who’s in?”
“I am.” Kamen righted his chair with a thunk. “I suck at writing, though.”
“I’ll spell-check you, buddy.”
Miles nodded. “I’m in.” Miles never missed a chance to show off his BDSM knowledge or voice his opinion on anything kink related. This would be right up his alley.
Only Gould remained silent.
“Gould?” I asked.
He looked up at me. “What if we reviewed doms?”
“Reviewed?”
“Yeah. What if we listed doms we’d played with and let people rate them on, like, safety and skill?”
“Ooh. Gould!” I could totally get into that.
“Noooo,” Miles said. “Terrible idea.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s a legal minefield.”
“We wouldn’t use anyone’s real names. Just their Fet names.”
“Still, it’s a public persona. And you think these guys won’t know who wrote the reviews? If we’re, like, describing specific scenes?”
“We can have a sign-up form to join the blog,” Gould suggested. “Make sure we only let submissives in. Doms never have to know it exists.”
“Yes, because that’s how the internet works. What happens when a member forwards the blog to one of the doms we’re writing about?”
I jumped in. “It’s not illegal to talk about people in the community on community-oriented forums. Remember that review on Fet a couple months ago trashing that rope group’s demo?”
Miles’s cardigan buttons clicked against the table’s edge. “But a group like that, they’re putting themselves in the public eye in a way that individuals aren’t.”
Miles and I had always been the most likely in the group to clash. He was more practical and rule abiding than I was, and sometimes the amount of time he spent on his high horse drove me crazy.
“I really think we’ll be fine,” I said, “as long as we don’t use names. And obviously, we do not publish any details about where the doms live, work, or whatever. Though in the case of doms who are genuinely unsafe, I see absolutely no reason not to link to their Fet profile, provide details of exactly what they did, and share any pics they’ve made available under their profile names, so subs’ll recognize them if they ever meet in a club.”
“The problem,” Miles insisted, “is that the doms who don’t give a shit about hurting subs in a scene are the ones who’d be crazy enough to retaliate if they’re outed.”
“So we should let them continue to scare their victims into keeping quiet?”
Miles sighed.
“Hey.” Kamen raised his hand.
“Yes, Kamen?” I said.
“If someone posts that, like, a dom is abusive, how do we know if they’re telling the truth?”
“That’s the same debate Fet was having last year, buddy. A bunch of dicks were saying that calling out abusers would turn into a witch hunt.”
“But why are they dicks for thinking that? Couldn’t it happen?”
“Could, but it’s not likely. And besides, it’s not like we’re prosecuting the crimes. We’d just give people a place to recount their experiences, as a warning to others.”
Gould nodded. “And each dom would, hopefully, have a collection of ratings. So you’d get a variety of opinions on whether they’re safe or not.”
“A human being is not a restaurant you rate on Yelp,” Miles argued. “Would you go on the internet and rate people you’d dated? Or had sex with?”
I looked at him strangely. “Totally.”
“Dude, there’s tons of sites like that,” Kamen pointed out.
Miles shook his head. “And they’re horrible. What, like Rate My Ex Girlfriend dot com? That’s . . . revenge porn.”
I opened a doc on my computer and started making notes, talking as I typed. “I’m pretty sure people tell stories about their former partners all the time in memoirs and essays and articles or whatever.” I was bullshitting. But Gould’s idea really did sound awesome to me, and I wanted Miles to come around to it. “We play the same way we normally would. And when we’re done, we give the dom a rating. Four stars for how they negotiate limits. Three for competence with equipment. Five for attitude. Or whatever.”
“I like it,” Gould said.
Kamen grinned. “Yeah, I’d be down.”
“It’s like Dave said—” Gould nudged Miles “—more than anything, we get people talking about what makes a good dom.”
Miles still looked unhappy. “We’re going to have a very small reach. We’re all queer. And we’ve all incestuously scened with the—what, six queer male doms in the community?”
I shrugged. “I’ve played with a shitload of guys who say they’re straight. But in the event that our reach seems too limited, we could invite members to suggest doms to rate. Then we post the doms’ screen names, and the members who’ve played with them can review them.”
“And I can be flexible with who I play with,” Gould mumbled.
I cocked my head, about to pursue that. But Miles broke in. “This is not what Hal would have wanted.”
Gould glanced sharply at Miles.
“Oh really?” I spoke cautiously, keeping an eye on Gould.
Miles was bouncing like he had a violet wand up his ass. Which, knowing him, was a distinct possibility. “Hal didn’t play safe, not by a long shot. He played like an idiot most of the time, and I doubt he’d have wanted to see us turn our sex lives into some kind of safety school special, or—”
“Stop it.” Gould was half out of his chair. “Just shut up right now.”
“Dude, Miles, that’s all you do!” I said. “Anytime we’re at the club, you lecture us on what the different pieces of equipment are called and how to use them properly, and—”
“Hal didn’t die because he was an idiot!” Gould’s voice was shaking. “He died because some jackass who called himself a dom broke the most basic fucking safety rules. He damn well would have wanted the community to be safer for other people.”
“You don’t know everything about him just because you fucked him!” Miles shot back.
“Whoa, guys, guys.” I looked from one to the other, not sure how we’d gotten here. “Calm down.”
Miles sniffed. Gould was still hovering just above his seat. He slowly sat back down.
“This isn’t revenge porn, or a safety special, or whatever,” I promised. “It’s just a forum where we talk about the issues submissives face in this community. And where subs can point out the strengths and weaknesses in the doms they play with. We have a chance to do something good here.” I turned to Miles. “You’re our best writer. And you’re so organized. I feel like you’ll do a great job. Not just writing articles, but moderating reviews and discussions. We need you.”
I could see flattery take hold. Miles straightened his cardigan. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll try it. But if this looks like it’s going to blow up in our faces, I shall exit the aircraft. With or without the rest of you.”
“So we’re agreed?” I asked. “The Subs Club is a thing? And we’ll have a review blog as part of the site?”
Gould was looking at the table and not at any of us, which worried me a little.
“I’ll get Ricky to help set up the review portion,” I went on. “He can be our IT guy.” I looked at each of them in turn. “Hey, guys? Welcome to the Subs Club.”
Kamen shook his head. “Every time you say it, man. Sandwiches.”