The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive by Joan Kelly Page A

love for pot and all things pill-shaped had morphed into a run-of-the-mill heroin habit by the time I was twenty-five. When my parents offered to pay for a hospital stay late one summer afternoon, I figured what the hell. I was dying of boredom, among other things, and rehab sounded like an interesting diversion to me.
        When I was a little over a year sober, I found myself not much more entertained than I had been back in my heroin daze. Firmly rooted in a $5.15 an hour job selling newspapers and magazines on a corner near my apartment, I thought if this was what the counselors had meant by a new freedom and a new happiness, I’d like to see about getting my old shitty depression back. In a seemingly unrelated incident around the time I was reaching my breaking point, my housemate at the time inherited a Stone Age computer from a friend. I had a twang of nostalgia for all the cute, non-kinky computer geeks I’d messed around with after Tim, and promptly splurged on an Internet account.
        Surfing the Web did indeed turn out to be a more interesting waste of time than what I’d been doing. On one of my first afternoons online, I came across a message board that claimed to be a place to discuss feminism. Considering the number of anti-feminist posts that had gravitated to it, I don’t know why I was so surprised to see this one among them:
         Ladies, stop lying to yourselves. Admit you want it. Visit www.spankingnet.com.
        Believing it to be someone’s idea of subversive humor, I resolved to ignore it at first. I had paranoid visions of some tracking system that kept a record of how many “feminists” were clandestinely taking the bait, for the purposes of a huge AHA! at some future point in time. Although I dreaded being the bad apple that poisons the reputation of the whole group, I lasted only a few hours before I had to return to the computer and look up the Web site.
        The site was not only real, it was better than any other real thing I had encountered in a long time. It was a place for the spanking-obsessed to put up personal ads and talk to each other live in chat rooms. With jittery hands, I typed a description of myself and posted it on the Web site, and by that evening, I had received more private messages in my kinky in-box than I had time to scan through before my housemate came home and needed the phone line.
        Before pure glee could sink in, I had a bout of nervousness about what I’d posted. In addition to stating I was very new to the whole bondage and discipline scene and looking for a decent, unattached person to explore with, I’d said I weighed one hundred ten pounds and had perfect 34C breasts. In actuality, I was closer to one twenty at the time, and my left breast was a tiny bit bigger than my right one. I had dread-filled visions of finally meeting someone, only to see his face fall before my eyes as he realized I’d oversold myself online. That evening, after my housemate went to bed and I had time to check my messages at a leisurely pace, it became instantly clear that my left breast was the least of my worries.
        It was as if the Renaissance Faire nerds had invaded Hustler magazine. I know this is judgmental, but I personally can’t get it up for people who address me as “M’lady.” Worse, these Little Lord Fauntleroys offered poorly written descriptions of everything they wanted to do to me — without so much as an initial “nice to meet you” — leaving me with visions of disembodied tongues shoving themselves rudely toward places they had not yet been invited. I resisted the urge to send out a mass reply consisting solely of the word Ick. On a positive note, it was a relief in a way, because all of my own anxiety about whether I’d be able to shed a few final pounds disappeared completely in the face of people who faked British accents in cyberspace.
        Thus, I was startled when I read the profile of a man who invited me