Irish Bitch

What transformed a pious Irish altar girl into a Domme capable of taking the skin off her lover’s back with a whip and reaching orgasm from that alone, without even touching herself? One thing is clear: it was either this or the convent. And for much of my life, the convent looked inevitable. Giving myself to God: how that thought stirs me. It always has: to be in the world but not of it—a suffering servant consecrated and blessed, devoted to God first, to her fellow man second, and to herself last.

My girlhood was a dream. I was blessed with devoted parents, anxiously working-class but smart and industrious, who instinctively put their children’s interests ahead of their own, who encouraged me but did not direct me, and who gave me the basic intellectual and emotional furnishings I would need to enter a posh university and claim my place among the ambitious professional classes.

We lived in Ballsbridge, in south Dublin, because the schools are said to be the best in Ireland. It was more than we could afford comfortably, but my parents sacrificed luxuries so that my brothers and I could grow up immersed in the social world of the bourgeoisie. They realised that there is not so much a glass ceiling in the workplace as a class ceiling, and they saw to it that the social conventions, dress, mannerisms, and most importantly, the assumptions, of the upper-middle classes were as natural to us as breathing.

Nevertheless, the secular Protestant values that my parents believed were essential to my future happiness never sprouted. That’s because they gave me another gift of even greater value than rich friends and posh schooling: they instilled in me a love of religion such as they themselves had. My most vivid early memories are of being at daily Mass with my mother. I marvelled at it. I can still remember the priest’s voice, completely unintelligible, rising and falling over the loudspeaker, impressing me more than anything I had known. I remember the smell of the church, the scent of old wood and damp stone; I recall having a distinct sense that it was a place unlike any other. I could have drawn it more faithfully than my own bedroom. When I first saw the Wizard of Oz, it was Mass I thought of when Dorothy and her companions had their first audience with the title character; and if the producers had hoped to mock religion by later exposing the dreary little man behind the curtain, I never picked up on it. Children are good at ignoring whatever they don’t understand or would rather not confront. The Oz audience room reminded me of church, all right, but the little man struck me as belonging to a different story. The scene’s appeal to American progressiveness as the slayer of Old-World superstition was entirely lost on me.

My parents loved to tell stories from the lives of the saints, which they knew well and adapted skilfully to everyday situations. A sore throat would inevitably inspire a lavish rendition of Saint Aloysius’s death—and yes, it never hurt quite so badly afterwards. Bullies giving your trouble at school? Consider Pope Saint Leo I, who by the grace of God single-handedly stared down Attila and his army of barbarians, and sent them all packing. Showing off? Let’s not forget the humility of Saint Peter, Our Lord’s chosen successor, who insisted on being crucified upside down lest his death resemble Christ’s own. There was no fear, no frustration, no challenge, no injury, no sorrow, no disappointment, and no disease that my parents couldn’t trivialise by comparison to something that a saint had endured.

My brothers and I loved these stories, always told in sumptuous detail, and I half think that we misbehaved with a mind toward hearing a new one. My parents were both gifted raconteurs: Mummy more dramatic, Papa more ironic, but both equally mesmerising.

And while they were mainstream Catholics—that is, as Catholic as anyone is likely to be in a country as thoroughly infected with British Protestantism as Ireland—the acorn of piety that they planted within me flourished and grew into a formidable, and audaciously ultramontane, hardwood that overshadowed my desire, and my parents hopes, for my eventual worldly success.

That’s ironic, although Papa would be the first to smile over it. The remarkable thing about my parents is that they only wanted their children to be happy. That, to them, was the ultimate measure of success.

The girls in my family were well outnumbered: my mother and me versus five boys and a father, so it should surprise no one that I would grow up an unrepentant tomboy. I was horsey; I was athletic; I had thick ankles. I was an assassin on the hockey field. Like my classmates, I kept a change of clothes in my knapsack, but instead of the Essex-girl kit involving slutty shoes and low cut tops and bangly jewellery that Irish girls typically keep at the ready, I had trainers, jeans and a t-shirt. At the end of the school day they would go to a café and change into insta-sluts in the toilets; I would run to meet my brothers and their mates. And you’d better believe I ran like a boy.

I learned to fight with my fists and with my words, and never hesitated to rely on whichever suited a given occasion. Boys fight dirty when they argue, changing the terms of the argument in quest of winning as opposed to being right, and this talent, honed over nearly two decades of struggling for supremacy among five bright and energetic brothers, served me well at school. I learned the boyish technique of leading an opponent down a rhetorical side path, urging her forward until her line of retreat is cut, then ambushing her. The trick, of course, is never to wander too far from the original line of reasoning. The victim mustn’t realise that they’re on terra nova until the attack begins, by which time they’re too involved in their own argument to backtrack. They flail wildly while you jab precisely, piercing and stinging them again and again. You don’t so much win as invite them to disgrace themselves. It’s a brutal technique, but it’s more effective than merely winning: it makes everyone who challenges you appear foolish. And the stigma lingers.

Thus I became a natural leader at school—captain of this, president of that. When we got into trouble, I would inevitably be required to explain it. “Destiny, you do the talking; you’re so good at it,” the girls would always whisper, their faces red with embarrassment as we faced the principal’s inquisition. They called me “Dykestiny” behind my back, but whenever they needed me, they were courteous to a fault.

I was in convent schools from kindergarten through college, so I would have no co-ed experience until university. Thanks to a network of brothers, my closest friends were always boys, although my early lovers were always girls. But I’m not gay; indeed, I find it difficult to believe that anyone really is. Of course, I feel the same about heterosexuals. People claim to be this or that, so I can only take their word. But for me, an attractive person can be either sex, and really, unless one of you is married or in a committed partnership, why on earth would you hesitate to fuck them?

Bisexual I may be, but my awakening was totally, and delightfully, gay. I think the reason is simply because I was more often in contact with girls in situations that could be sexualised mentally: bored in class and daydreaming, when suddenly a girl shifts in her chair revealing a glimpse of white panty and triggering a sexual fantasy; or being taken with the intoxicating scent of girl sweat in the changing room after sport; or showering together after gym and noticing our nipples tightening as water evaporated from our skin; even the common sight of Mary Janes and white knee socks could get me started. School became a sexual Disneyland for me.

With boys there was never much intimacy or time to daydream. We were in the street or at the pitch; we cruised, we played football; we traded insults; we laughed and fought; we argued and pushed. In other words, we had fun. Perhaps fun is the ultimate antidote to sexual arousal, and perhaps the question of who you end up desiring sexually depends to some degree on who tends to be nearby when you’re bored.

From the age of nine I began masturbating and reaching orgasm every day. It’s a habit that I’ve never lost. Maybe seven times out of ten I would fantasise about a girl I knew. As I got older, boys came to occupy my sexual thoughts more often.

My first experiences were inevitably with classmates. The home tutoring session was always a handy pretext: everyone knew I was smart, and everyone assumed I was boy crazy because I travelled in a flotilla of lads. So it struck no one as odd that I might turn up at another girl’s house with a stack of books and that we would need her bedroom. No surprise either that we locked the door, because little siblings never appreciate how important school work can be. And certainly no surprise that we needed the music on, because everyone knows that girls can’t concentrate without it.

I had my first sexual encounter with a classmate named Anastasia when we were thirteen. We started timidly, barely daring to hold hands under the desk and blushing hotly, but over time we did just about everything that two girls can manage together and eventually taught each other to be multi-orgasmic. Still, however many times we came together in the afternoons, at night I would lie in bed and recall our session, and make myself come two or three times more. My school years were a blur of five- and six-orgasm days.

When we entered college, she got a boyfriend and I was interested in other girls, so we kept things friendly and occasional, although we remained lovers until uni, and once in a while on holiday even then, for old times’ sake. We’re still good friends, although she’s married now and the mother of two, and doesn’t play around. Which is a pity, because her husband is quite yummy, and I’ve never found it difficult to imagine him jumping us together.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Boys would remain mates, and girls lovers, until university. It was in college where I blossomed sexually; and after being with a number of partners, I discovered something unusual about myself: I have a preposterously large clit. It’s long and prominent, like a little cock, and the folds are clearly draped over it. It’s nearly two inches in length and the glistening pink end becomes visible on its own when I’m aroused. I can look down and see it when I’m standing. But my body is otherwise feminine: my hips are wide, my bottom round, and my breasts generous and full with big, pale pink nipples. I’m not one of those squat, rectangular dykes who looks like a tired, overworked little man. I just have this enormous, cock-like clit. I’m not self-conscious about it; I consider it an asset, actually, but I’ve often wondered if its exaggerated size connects in some way to my exaggerated sexual appetite.

If I never lost the daily habit of experiencing several orgasms, whether with someone or alone, I also never lost the habit of attending daily Mass, which my parents established for me from early childhood. And both, really, are far more than habits; they’re my twin passions.

We attended St. Mary’s in Haddington Road. It’s a neo-gothic church from the late nineteenth century with a gorgeous smell from the old wooden pews. It felt like a cathedral to me as a little girl, with a cool, and seemingly vast, interior. The sounds of footsteps, whispers, and subdued coughs would echo with a special hush that I never heard elsewhere. It was a place apart: it felt, smelled, and sounded like no other room in the world. The space itself radiated a presence that I could feel altering my perceptions and preparing my mind for experiences to which the outside world is sadly numb.

I had my first vision during my maternal grandfather’s requiem. He had willed that the Dies Iræ and Litaniæ Sanctorum be chanted in Latin, and the choir obliged. We had just received the Eucharist and the priest was blessing the casket, raising thick clouds of incense around it. The organ was sombre but loud enough for me to feel in my chest and belly as the litany of saints began.

Whenever I receive the Eucharist, something happens: I weep. It always occurs when I return to the pew to kneel and cover my face. I once asked a priest why this might be, and he told me that I must have great compunction, that is, a lovely awareness of guilt—for as we say before we receive, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa. But I knew in my heart that he was mistaken: the Eucharist is not redemptive like the sacrament of Penance; it is sanctifying. It is the most intimate touch of Christ’s body, a touch that makes the unclean holy and acceptable to God: the touch that healed lepers, made the lame walk, and gave sight to the blind. By answering wrong, the priest gave me an opportunity to think it through on my own and answer right. My tears are joyful ones of sheer gratitude for the opportunity to touch God—literally, physically—every day, and allow his grace to cleanse me: mortal and corrupt, diseased and infirm, incomplete and unworthy, and yet, through this miracle, sanctified. It is not redemption, but transformation, that the Eucharist vouchsafes us.

On this occasion I wept more than usual. It wasn’t so much the loss of my grandfather, which of course I felt, but his awesome encounter with eternity that moved me. I did not choke or heave or sob. The tears flowed without resistance. It felt so good to weep. So right.

The church walls receded and slowly disappeared. The roof dissolved. I had gooseflesh. And then I was greeted by a vision of unforgettable splendour: I found myself in a valley surrounded by hills. Dense thunderheads of black and no fewer than five shades of grey, here coifed in Pompadour swells, there cleft and cleanly striated, floated barely above the ground like weightless mountains, erupting silently and slowly as damascene wisps of white vapour drifted up from waist-high grass to entangle them. It was the very essence of black and white photography, graciously imitated and bettered by nature. I was dripping wet, shivering but not cold, awe struck but unafraid. The hills were veiled; the sky was gone; the air smelt of grass and wet stone. A seductive mist enveloped me, caressed me, welcomed me to this eerie theatre of beauty. I saw my grandfather, unmistakable yet youthful and vibrant. His face was radiant with love and joy. When he spoke it was with his voice, and a hundred voices. He smiled as if pleasantly surprised and said, “Darling, you stopped dreaming,” and silently faded into the clouds as if becoming one with them.

Thus was my love affair with the Catholic Church consummated. I was eleven years old. From that day, St. Mary’s became more than a wonderful place where I retreated each day to measure the modern world and to contemplate the shortcomings, and the splendours, of both the secular and the spiritual realms as I knew them. I had changed, and religion would no longer serve merely as a living critique of the world; it was now monumentally seductive to me, in mind, body, and spirit. I began to react physically to the environment within the church building. Entering would produce the deliciously contradictory sense of my mind relaxing, and of a tingly excitement deep in my stomach. The smallest gesture of humility became a treasure. Merely to genuflect before the tabernacle was a joyful act: as I lowered my head and felt my knee touch the floor, I would feel a sense of profound rightness—of body and mind in perfect harmony. And yes, it was undeniably erotic.

After Mass, I would often remain in the empty church, kneeling at the altar because there are no cushions, my head lowered and face covered, praying and letting my imagination wander freely. Pain would spread from my legs and lower back, growing more intense while I became more eager to feel it. Pain didn’t break the spell: my state of concentration would somehow keep pace with it, somehow expand and deepen just as the pain would sharpen, and thus I’d remain able to embrace it while it mounted slowly but relentlessly. And yes, that too was unmistakably erotic.

I became an altar girl, of course. It’s not actually sanctioned by the Church, but our bishop never asked and our pastor never told. Later, I attended a convent college near my house, assuming it to be inevitable that I would take vows. I loved the daily rituals, the discipline, the formality. Above all, I loved the Mass. But as I learned to revel in the exercise of humility and to adore pain, it became difficult for me to enact penance. How do you punish yourself for God when pain feels sexy? To be so pure and so good that punishment is unnecessary would have been a way to deny myself the strange pleasures of penance, but that would be absurd. The split second when you realise how good you are, you have sinned.

And how can humility be penance when it feels so right? Ministering to the sick, changing foul-smelling bandages—you know you’re doing it for God. To us Catholics, God is no micro-manager. We are his eyes and hands; we do his will, or we fail to do it: there is evil and misery and suffering in the world not because God allows it, but because we allow it. We were given dominion over the Earth; we are God’s agents, his stewards, his servants. We bow our heads and do his bidding. We confront evil, alleviate suffering, nurture the weak and vulnerable, and however unpleasant it might seem in principle, it is always a joyful act. There is no humiliation in humility before God. There’s no punishment there.

And so I was stuck with a dilemma: pain and humility felt far too good. Thus, for my penance, I tried to withhold worldly pleasures, but I was never any use at it. I smoked; I drank; I had sex. I would give them up tomorrow, always tomorrow: as Augustine lamented humorously, “Lord, make me pure, but not today.”

I felt I had time; Augustine would reach his early thirties before finally overcoming his appetites, and he was a great saint. Would it not have been immodest of me to out-do him?

Of course, there was never any danger of that. Once, I bought a jar of potted foie gras and kept it visible on a shelf in my bedroom with a mind toward resisting it daily. I would sit quietly to contemplate its richness, its unique flavour, and dream of perfect toast crackers and a gorgeous Sauternes to accompany it. I would imagine all of this vividly, until I was literally groaning with hunger. I would do this once a day, and revel in self denial.

The foie gras didn’t last long. The night after I bought it, I sat up in bed and ate it with a spoon in less than thirty minutes, thanking God the entire time for having created something so stunningly beautiful. Then I got under the covers and masturbated, fantasising about a girl I had watched in the changing room that afternoon. The taste of foie gras was still in my mouth, and I imagined licking it off her big, hard nipples when I came.

Throughout my teen years, my sexual desires progressed alongside my religious desires, and it became clear that I would somehow have to bring my hedonistic and spiritual impulses into alignment. I had many false starts, and these form the core matter of the story that follows. The questions I must ask are, I hope, intriguing. Is it possible to be genuinely pious and sexually hyperactive at once?

Surely it is to some extent: Origen crushed his own balls between two rocks to conquer his erotic desires, but what sort of religious progress is that? Piety comes too easily to the castrati, I think. I’ve also got to explore whether the D/s lifestyle is a fraud, a license to abuse—that is, mere justification for destructive sexual urges—or whether it can be a legitimate, even healthy, way for some people to live. Finally, I must ask why I find sex to be so spiritual, and religious practice so damn erotic.

I will offer a hint. An interesting complication arose while I was at university, during a period when I was reading theology and having sex with women and men in a fairly even ratio. One woman in particular, Ania, a lecturer in Russian history and a lesbian, had begun to win my affection as I won hers. We began seeing each other regularly, and a romance developed. We both enjoyed rough sex, which became a regular feature of our intimate times together. She told me that she was involved in BDSM, and further that she was submissive, but I had no idea what that really meant.

One night we climbed into bed after a long, sensuous candle-lit bath together. Ania had a surprise for me. This time, we didn’t have rough sex in the usual sense; this was different. It was clear that she expected me to obey and not to resist or even to question her. She literally commanded me: how to kiss, how to lie, what to do. She told me what I was feeling, and how much I liked it. She degraded me verbally, and she violated me physically.

She slapped me so hard I nearly blacked out. She choked me, digging her nails into the soft skin of my neck, and drew a little of my blood. She bit my ears, and my nipples, hard. She didn’t ask permission; she demanded and took what she wanted of me, without apology, without reservation. And I loved every moment of it.

I began to feel free—actually liberated. It sounds paradoxical, but it’s true. As I let her control me, I felt less aware of myself. The more I submitted—delivering myself to her, sacrificing myself to her—the less bound I felt by the chains of my own personality, history, agenda, even consciousness. It was truly a religious experience. I surrendered and allowed her will to control me, welcoming it, inviting it, releasing control of myself with joy, and yes, with awe.

The more I relinquished control, the more I wanted to be controlled. But I was not completely free of self-consciousness until she did something that literally stripped away my ego. I’m unabashedly bisexual, and I don’t mind saying it: I love men. I’d been with lesbians before, and I’ll confess that, secretly, I feel superior to them: “Scared of a man’s cock? Ha, you neurotic Puritan,” I would sneer. And she knew this, and she reached into me and brought it up, and used it.

She was fisting me, and I thought, this has got to be as painful as childbirth. The pain danced through me, making me tremble violently, electrifying me—a dull, heavy aching with moments of brilliant sharpness. It was her pain and I loved it with my very heart. I begged her to fuck me harder still. And then she sneered at me, shouting, “Feel this hand that fucks and owns your pussy! Stronger and harder than any man-cock you ever had in your pathetic bi fantasies!”

And that was the master stroke. She took this personal thing from deep in my mind and humiliated me with it. At that moment, I released every last shred of my ego to her, willingly, longingly, with blind devotion and genuine awe. And then I came in a violent spasm that rolled through me in waves, again, and again, and again.

When the spasms subsided, she reached under the bed and produced a boot—not a sexy girl boot, but a man’s combat boot. It was dirty. She reached across to the nightstand and produced a mirror. As I lay in bed, completely drained, or so I thought, she held the mirror in front of my face. “Look at yourself, you fucking lesbian’s toy,” she hissed.

I saw my face red and bruised. She pressed the sole of the boot against my cheek, and ground it in forcefully while I watched.

“I want you to tell me something bitch,” she demanded. “I want you to look at yourself very, very closely and tell me if you have ever, ever in your life, looked as beautiful as you do right now.”

As I started to answer, I came again. There was no genital contact; I simply came. “Never,” I howled, “oh Jesus fuck I’m coming…oh God, Jesus, never, never!”

It was an epiphany.

She could have asked me to read about BDSM and the D/s lifestyle. She could have talked to me about it, explained it at length, and that could have gone on for months without my ever getting it. But instead, she made me experience what she experiences as a sub. And thus I understood it, and from that moment I knew instinctively how to bring it about for her.

She did this to me because we were in love, and there’s nothing more beautiful to a sub than to have the woman she loves become her Mistress. I began to dominate her during sex, and this brought us closer than we had ever been—a development that I didn’t think possible, so close and so intimate had we become already.

After about a month of this, I sensed that she needed to go further. She needed to submit outside of sex. As her lover, I naturally wanted to do everything possible to give her pleasure and happiness. I grasped instinctively that I would have to collar her to give her all that she wanted and needed and deserved. And so I claimed her as my sub. I had no experience as a Domme, but she had plenty as a sub and she trained me well. But I did it for her, as a lover whose only desire was to give her pleasure. I did it to serve her, that wonderful woman whose orgasms I enjoyed more than my own. Thus I didn’t make her my slave; rather, she made me her Mistress.

The sub makes the Dom/me. The sub is not weak; indeed, the strength and courage required to submit fully are extraordinary, and command the utmost respect. Domination is service, and submission is liberation. Paradoxical yes, even a bit Orwellian, but I accept what is apparent, if not rational, in the D/s relationship: the Dom/me has the control, but the sub has the power. I feel it, I experience it, and whether it makes sense or it doesn’t, I believe it.

And so my journey into the lifestyle began with a lesbian love affair at uni. I’ve since been sub and Domme, and at times both with different lovers. When I’m submissive, I prefer men to Dominate me. As a Domme, I prefer women for my subs. I’ve never been able to submit to a woman beyond switching top and bottom during sex, although I’m happy to do that once in a while. Still, I’ve never felt the desire to have a Mistress, only a Master. I find submissive men loathsome: sensitive 90’s guys—men who would let a woman walk all over them—leave me cold. If a man can’t top me, no way is he going to fuck me.

Submissive women, on the other hand, delight me. That’s a bit conventional of me, appealing to traditional sex roles, I know, but there it is. I am what God made me.

And yes, religion is involved. Rituals of self-sacrifice and submission are as old as mankind, but they reach an apotheosis in Christianity, and especially in Roman Catholicism, where the colour and pageantry of earlier Christian practices are better preserved. As a little girl, my favourite ceremony was the Via Crucis, the Stations of the Cross, a progressive recollection of Christ’s passion and death enacted during Easter week. I still find it breathtaking to contemplate Christ’s sacrifice and to dwell on each detail of his humiliation and agony—both transformed into sublime beauty by his disposition of self-giving love and transcendent purpose.

And then there’s the lifestyle: that other thing that I find breathtaking. The Church would regard it as a perversion of healthy—and I believe universal—human impulses toward submission, and I won’t argue with that. Indeed, BDSM is probably a modern substitute for the unfashionable religious experience of self-sacrifice, which over the centuries has been steadily de-corporealised in Christian traditions, although less so among Catholics, many of whom still fast, and some of whom still practice mortification of the flesh.

In thinking of BDSM as a trigger for a certain type of religious experience, I’m intrigued by the number of educated, successful career women of my own acquaintance who are in the lifestyle, who feel embarrassed to practice religion with any real passion and yet feel compelled to surrender themselves to be sexually degraded, bound, physically assaulted, verbally abused, and controlled. We call it “choosing submission” in homage to the shallow feminist social values we’ve been trained to espouse, but clearly, we women have needs that the modern world will not acknowledge, yet which nature demands be satisfied.

It is truly an ironic triumph of liberal education that BDSM should be less embarrassing than Catholicism to a growing number of middle- and upper middle class women? Most of my D/s partners and acquaintances profess to be agnostic or atheist, are puzzled that I should be devoted to religious practice, and yet eagerly make the Via Crucis in suburban basement dungeons in quest of the very experience that their rejection of religion has starved them of.

Yes, BDSM is a substitute for religious experience in a world that is hostile to religion; and while I see this clearly, I remain nonetheless immersed in it. The sensation of release possible through submission truly feels spiritual, so I will not be leaving the lifestyle any day soon to join Opus Dei and practice mortification of the flesh in a more chaste manner. Some day, perhaps, I might have an epiphany, discard my collar and leash, and take up the cilice in their place. But for now, the similarities in, and the inevitable tension between, my rather outré sexual and spiritual practices are all I can explore.

I acknowledge my parents, and I love them. Still, however carefully they laid the foundations of my personality, they’re clearly not the strongest influences in my life, dear as they are. Rather, I’ve been formed chiefly by the Church, and by my comically oversized clit—and, most notably, by the endless contest between them.

This, then, is the history of that struggle.