Kristina Splits

by Kristina Lloyd

Gather round. Help yourself to cake. This is my last post for a while so please add a splash of goodbye gin to your morning tea. I’ve had a fabulous year here and made some wonderful friends, both real and cyber. However, I need to lie low and get ink on my fingers so am hanging up my blog hat for 2008.

I’m signing off with a reminder that Split, my new novel of bondage, submission and puppetry, has just been released in the States. I’ve had some wonderful feedback since its UK release and, as this is my last post, I hope you’ll forgive me for showing off massively then posting a hot excerpt!

‘Kristina Lloyd writes incredible sex scenes. Her prose is beautiful - even when the scene being described is positively grimy - and she uses novel, original language. … [Split] is clever, beautiful, dreamy and gritty. The language is rich, yet economical. The characters authentic and intriguing. I loved it.’ (Tumperkin on Dionne Galace's site, a review so glow-y I want to read Split myself.)

‘Kristina Lloyd writes sex with formidable force. The eroticism in this novel is glorious and gratifying without being gratuitous and graphic. … This is a masterpiece of erotic storytelling that, like the village of Heddlestone, draws the reader in and holds them there indefinitely.’ (Ashley Lister, Erotic Readers and Writers Association)

‘Kristina, you write beautifully, yet still manage to be utterly filthy’. (Clare)

‘Really haunting … I had to read the last chapter walking into work because I couldn’t wait to find out what happened.’ (Sarah)

‘Guy read the spanking scene to me in bed. It was excellent. I promise I’ll read it in the right order soon.’ (Julia)

'Brilliant book … infinitely disturbing.’ (Sally)

‘You took me somewhere, you really did.’ (Jackie)

‘It was so full of menace and suspense and fabulous edgy sex that I could hardly bear to put it down.’ (Kate)

‘It's insane and brilliant …vivid and unique …all the gothic stuff is so rich … and when she was fucked in the mouth by the stranger from the club house I got a hard cock.’ (Ewan)

OK, so maybe some of those reviews are actually things my friends said – but I reckon they still count. I have two copies of Split to give away so pop over to my blog, add a comment, and one of them could be yours.

You’ll find an early excerpt from Split right here, and below is a piece from later in the book. Kate has been tied to a chair by Jake, her body all parcelled up with hemp rope. Consider it my, um, parting shot.

His touch was perfection, bringing me right down. I relaxed, my sobs easing. Within seconds my clit seemed to double in size as if all my terror had been transformed into lust. ‘All OK,’ Jake repeated, and my noises of panic faded to moans of pleasure. He ran a couple of fingers along my slippery crease then hooked them inside me, finding moisture.

'You’re so wet,’ he said. ‘I knew you would be. You like this, don’t you?’

At that moment, I liked it more than anything in the world. His fingers pressed on my wall, nudging my flesh in intense little rhythms while his thumb flicked. I felt so safe with him. It was too much for me even to speak. I mumbled incoherently as he masturbated me, nice and steady, building me to my peak.

‘Have you thought about saying “yes”?’ he asked.

'Huh?’

'To my favour?’

I hadn’t given it a second thought.

‘Have you?’

He obviously wanted words. ‘No,’ I mumbled. ‘What is it?’

‘If you say “yes” I’ll tell you.’

‘Tell me first,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

‘I can’t yet,’ he said. ‘I want you agree to it first.’

He shifted his fingers a fraction, thumb on my sweet spot, upping the tempo and making me pant with nearness. Waves shivered along my legs, rising from ankles to thighs, lapping closer every time. ‘Yes, okay,’ I moaned. ‘Yes.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said. ‘You’ll go back on your word.’

My thoughts exactly.

'When you say yes, I want you to mean it,’ he went on. ‘Your tits look nice like that, all roped off.’

He withdrew his fingers then cupped the weights of my bound, jutting breasts.

'Jake, please,’ I said. ‘Don’t torment me.’

'Wriggle,’ he said, and I did as I was told.

I heard a noise snag in his throat and then he was backing away from me, unfastening his jeans. He freed his cock and it sprang out from his dark bush, glorious and potent, his tip so fat and ruddy.

'Oh,’ I said, wanting it.

'He gripped himself and began shuffling his fist, bright eyes pinned on my tied body. ‘Fuck, I like you like this,’ he said.

God, but I liked him too, loved that he was hot for me, standing there with his jeans around his thighs. He pumped hard and fast, head bowed, shoulders hunching as his hand became a blur. His face was loose and red, his thick brown curls shuddering as he wanked. I struggled and whimpered, knowing it turned him on to see my flesh shake. I was resentful too, jealous of his freedom to beat off.

'Uh, uh,’ he grunted, and the sound of his pleasure was so acutely arousing I wondered if I might come simply from watching him.

‘Uh,’ he said, getting closer now, and he hobbled nearer, awkward in lowered jeans. I protested, squirming extra forcefully and, with a hoarse cry and a twist of his face, he came, jetting hard across my stomach and thighs. His semen striped my skin in an echo of the ropes, leaving me criss-crossed and wet, dripping with his liquid and damp with my own.

He gazed at the sight, shoulders heaving as he caught his breath. Oh, but he was beautiful, gawping at me with his lips parted, the colour high in his face.

'Please,’ I managed. ‘I want to come too. So badly.’ I leant out to him, the chair-back digging into the underside of my arms. ‘Please.’ I was excruciatingly close, I knew I’d be there in seconds. He could probably have blown on my clit and he’d have tipped me over the edge.

Jake looked at me as if I were an alien. Then he buttoned his flies. ‘Back in a while,’ he said and he walked out of the room.


Kristina
XXX

Buy Split on Amazon UK :: Read more :: Buy Split on Amazon US

Split and Lust Bites out today!

Kristina Lloyd

'My story starts last autumn. I want to set it down because I understand now that I’ll never be able to leave this place. And I want you to remember me as a good person.'

So begins Split, my neo-Gothic tale of bondage and submission set in a puppet museum on the Yorkshire moors. And today it’s out in the UK along with Lust Bites, the hot volume of vampire erotica from me, Portia Da Costa and Mathilde Madden. (Sorry Yanks, you have to wait till January.)

Split tells the story of Kate, a woman who flees London and her boyfriend to take a job in a weird little village called Heddlestone. She doesn’t tell her boyfriend she’s leaving. Drawn by a strange compulsion, she simply vanishes. I am Kate Carter, five foot nothing, freckled and fair, pear-shaped but sprightly, a librarian on the run.

Kate lodges in the attic of Jake, the strange, beautiful puppeteer whose surreal, doll-filled house adjoins the museum. When Kate first meets Jake, she’s smitten.

He was too tall for his suit so he was all wrists and ankles, a man almost as gangly as his puppets. I know I’m a romantic fool, but my stomach really did flip. His hat was of battered brown leather, dark curls peeping beneath the brim, and his pale skin was dotted with a couple of moles. His nose was narrow, a little misshapen, and his cheekbones enviable, his face having a refined feminine bone structure, although his neck was strong. He reminded me of a deer, full of wild nervous grace, his stone-grey eyes at once timid and serene.

Jake’s social awkwardness is belied by a dark, sexual confidence and when he and Kate get together it seems as if, surrounded by puppets and isolated from the world, they’re in a realm where anything might happen. But Kate also desires Eddie, Jake’s brother, a thickly-muscled bruiser who’s smug, arrogant, contemptuous and crude. Although she dislikes him, Kate recognises some warped part of her finds him horribly thrilling. Soon she’s involved in a second dark relationship, and all the while she's haunted by a gathering sense that there's something very wrong about Heddlestone.

There’s a cold intimacy to this place and the brothers have drawn me closer to its dark, disturbed heart. They had me from the start, Jake with his beauty and that clever careful mind, Eddie with his arrogance that gets me right in the groin. Even now, I don’t know who I prefer. I’m split between them, relishing both but trusting neither. Lust has taken me to some strange places but none stranger than this.

Split is released today along with Lust Bites. This makes me very happy!

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Something else which makes me very happy is being the first author in Love Honey’s newly-launched erotic online book club. Love Honey are running a huge promotion on my second, ever-so-slightly-controversial book, Asking for Trouble, and you can buy it over there for a ridiculous 99p. Yes, I'm dirt cheap! The book club looks fantastic. You can read an interview with me, join an Asking for Trouble discussion forum, and there are even questions for you to ponder. I confess, I’m nervous. Some people love Asking for Trouble, some people hate it. If you don’t already own it, now’s your chance. I doubt I will ever be 99p again. That’s so cheap, you may as well buy a vibrator while you’re there.

To celebrate all this happiness, I’m giving away a copy of Split and Lust Bites on my blog. Come on over to my place and add a comment. I am very friendly, so friendly that I'll say Lusties can play too.

Split: an excerpt

Kristina Lloyd

My third novel, Split (aka Wuthering Heights with bondage) is released in 13 days time in the UK. Here's a sexy excerpt from chapter one. To set the scene: Kate and her boyfriend, on holiday in the Yorkshire moors, find themselves in a weird little village called Heddlestone whose only attraction is a puppet museum. One night, they stumble upon an odd scene unfolding inside Heddlestone’s Working Men’s Club. A woman in ghoulish make-up and a shabby ballerina costume, stands alone in the middle of the room, her raised arms tethered to a rope. She’s soon joined by two men. Kate and her boyfriend (‘you’ in the scene below) stand outside in the dark, watching through the window.

*
I wanted to be that woman. I was scared for her and yet I ached to be in her place, two strong horny men prowling around me. Her powerlessness was horribly appealing. She was entirely in their hands and they were randy and reckless. God, what luxury.

‘Do you think she’s okay?’ you asked.

A small moth fluttered at the window before settling there, its cottony wings mottled with silver-grey, camouflaged against the dirty glass.

'I’d say so, yeah,’ I replied, and I cupped a hand to your crotch, thrilled to find you hard within your jeans.

The bearded courtier walked away, out of view again, and the first guy, the bruiser, took up his position, standing before the woman. He fluffed up her skirts in a gauzy snowstorm, reaching beneath them. With his feet apart, his arm hidden beneath her nets, he began to work her, just a slight movement of his elbow to betray what he
was doing, his tattooed band flexing on his beefy arm. Only when one of them moved could we see her face. For a while she was expressionless, just a black-eyed, rosy-cheeked mask of madness, then her mouth was open, her neck taut, her breasts jutting. We watched her panting silently, her body writhing, her arms tugging on the rope.

She seemed to climax in a frenzy of pulling and gasping and immediately the man untied her. His mean expression faded and he kneaded her upper arms, the two of them talking normally as she rolled her shoulders and rubbed her wrists. The courtier came into view again, and he was dragging across the lino an old gymnast’s vaulting bar, the suede of its padded beam worn and patchy.

I hadn’t seen one since school days and the mere sight of it was enough to make my stomach churn in anxiety. I associated it with public humiliation. I hated games, especially gymnastics. I was always too chunky, too soft and fleshy to go hurtling about as if my body were light as a feather.

Together, the men moved the vault into the centre. Without a word, the woman leant over it, her upper body lying along its length, her sheepskin boots just touching the ground. She wriggled for comfort as the bruiser untied her red sash and wound it around her body and the beam, knotting it so she was bound to the apparatus.

The woman was calm, lying there with her cheek pressed to the bar, her panda eyes two holes in her panstick face. The man walked around, appraising her from different angles. My heart was thumping. He had such a cool arrogant manner, such a swagger in his attitude. His face was impassive and he showed no emotion either when, with a couple of sharp tugs, he pulled down the woman’s skirts, tossing them aside. Her pale buttocks were bared, and he looked at them as he fiddled with his zip.

His jeans crumpled around his knees and he shuffled closer, penetrating her with a quick jab. He fucked her with a light, casual manner, one hand pressing on her back as he gazed blankly ahead. It was like seeing an animal fuck, his pumping so regular and functional. Every now and then, he glanced down, perhaps to check if she was still breathing. She seemed so unimportant to him he might have been masturbating alone.

I couldn’t take my eyes off his thighs. They were immense and glorious, full of curves and muscle, sheathed in fine hair.

Next to me, you said, ‘Ah, c’mon, fuck.’ In a hurry, I began undoing your fly and you undid your belt, moving into position behind me, stones scuffing up around us. We might have looked over our shoulders to check we were alone. I don’t recall. In London, we’d have been scanning for CCTV, wondering if grainy footage of us was going to end up in some murky corner of the internet. But not in Heddlestone. There’s nothing like that here. There’s no need. Everybody watches everybody else.
Do you think we were alone that night? I doubt it. Someone, somewhere would have been watching, night-vision binoculars trained on us, two unknown figures fucking in a ghostly, green-tinged world.

You lifted up my skirt and I shimmied down my tights. The air on my skin was cool and thrilling, and the exposure made me loosen. I felt earthy and lewd, and I could picture my buttocks, plump pale moons surrounded by dark rumpled fabric. Urgent and hard, you drove into my wetness, clasping me around the waist as you thrust. My arse cheeks jiggled as your hips bumped up against their flesh. The stone crunched beneath our feet.

Flakes of paint, I noticed, had chipped off the window frame and the corners were furred with black mould. Beyond the glass, the bearded guy was grinning at the woman, thrusting out his pelvis and rubbing his crotch with comic lewdness. Then he unbuttoned, wanking close to her face before he stripped completely. In one swift movement, he straddled the vault, edging forward until his erection was by her head.

The women raised her mouth for him, her body jolting from the impact of the hulk pumping her at the other end. Eagerly, she swallowed his cock and I could see the bulge in her cheek as she sucked up and down. He wound her blonde hair around a fist, exchanging a few words with the other guy who was still ramming her with detached regularity, his arse cheeks hollowing above those giant thighs.

You and I weren’t so cool. Your finger was on my clit, tapping as we fucked. Where I braced myself, the stone was cold and rough beneath my palms. We got into a good rhythm, me slamming back as you shoved high and hard. The air snagged in my throat as I panted, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming. Just keep me there. Just ...’ I could feel that soft, gorgeous easiness in my hips and thighs, waves of it carrying me closer. And at the same time, voices from the village road. ‘There, yes,’ I urged, desperate to come and not be interrupted. ‘There, there.’

You nuzzled past my hair, your breath warm on the back of my neck, teeth scraping, half-kissing, half-biting as you fucked and frigged me to climax. Indoors, the bearded guy closed his eyes, head tipped back, mouth parting slackly. He might have been coming, I don’t know. But his small moment of surrender nudged me past my limit and I hit orgasm, gasping quietly. There was no time for you.

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To read more about Split, about me and my other dirty books, visit my brand new site. I'm having a blogwarming today and you're all welcome! Bring a puppet.

Split is published 8th November (UK) and 1 Jan (US). It's only £3.90 on Amazon right now. The price will shoot up when it's published so pre-order and bag a bargain!

Win, win, win! Top prize is my filth in triplicate, ie the novels: Darker Than Love, Asking for Trouble and Split. Two runners-up win Split. Just add a comment. Results on Sunday.

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The image at the top of this post is one of Beth Robinson's creepily beautiful creations. Check out Beth's website for more strange dolls and if you're in London this autumn, see more of Beth's work at the Strychnin Gallery. Strychnin's grand opening is tonight!

Sex to Save the World!

Kristina Lloyd
On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Today is Blog Action Day and over 15 000 blogs are participating. Lust Bites is one of them!

Here are our ten ways to be green and sexy:

1. Do it in the dark. Yes, that means you. Stop being so goddamn kinky and make out like you have some hang ups. In the dark, you’re forced to feel your way around with lips, fingers and skin, to listen closer to all those breathy moans and sighs. It’s sexy, slippery and fumbly. Plus, when you can’t see your lover’s face, they could be David Beckham. I mean, anyone, they could be anyone.

2. Reduce, reuse! Buy less stuff. It’s a waste of the planet’s resources and only creates more crap to be disposed of. Start seeing the world through pervertable eyes, and you’ll find plenty of objects with dual-function potential. Get spanky with a wooden spoon, borrow clothes-pegs from the washing line, aim the shower nozzle right there. For inspiration, read Mathilde Madden’s wonderful story, Pervertable, in B is for Bondage and explore Alison ‘Scrubber’ Tyler’s Bondage on a Budget for tips and tales on what to do with chopsticks, bathrobe-belts, egg whisks and the dishwasher on ‘scrub’ cycle.

3. Recycle! Check out Love Honey’s recycle your rabbit campaign. Use rechargeable batteries and recycle those too. NASTY FACT: Around 600 million UK household batteries (22,000 tonnes) – the equivalent weight of 110 Jumbo Jets – are sent to landfill unnecessarily every year. (And not all of them are mine.)

4. Save water! Bathe with a buddy or, better still, share a shower.

5. Use hemp rope for bondage. Not only is it more environmentally-friendly than synthetic rope, it’s the traditional rope for Japanese bondage. Try the nice folk at Twisted Monk for samples and supplies. And (Shameless Plug Alert) read Split, my forthcoming puppets and bondage book for some serious hemp-rope action.

6. Many sex toys are made using phthalates. (It’s pronounced: ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake - is nothing sacred.’) Phthalates are oil-derived chemical compounds used to soften plastic. Over time, they migrate to the surface of plastic and evaporate or leach into their surrounding environment. (That's why plastic goes brittle.) Their use is widely banned in the manufacture of children's toys while their use in adult toys remains unregulated. This being the internet, you can read stories about people who've grown a second head after a good old session with their jelly-feel butt plug. You can also read reports claiming phthalates are essentially harmless, usually from companies with a vested interest in their production. Sometimes, I don't know who to believe. On a global level, phthalates are one of the biggest industrial pollutants, and that's not good. On an individual level, you're probably more at risk from bacteria on an unwashed vibe. But, call me fussy, I'd still rather not stuff something up my chuff that's too toxic to go into a baby's mouth.

7. Don’t flush condoms. Most condoms are made primarily of latex which biodegrades although not when underwater. Send dead rubbers to landfill. It's not ideal but safe sex is crucial and sometimes you've just got to swallow it. Goodness, did I really say that?

8. Check out the horny hippies at Fuck for Forest and put some politics into your porn and some porn into your politics.

9. Quit using plastic bags. In the UK, a campaign is growing to make Christmas 2007 plastic-bag free. If you haven't got your own bag, you could invest in a Lust Bites 'I ♥ dirty books' tote bag as modelled by my friend Bam Bam on Brighton beach.

10. Get back to nature and shag outdoors. A breeze on your nethers is heaven, and it helps to be reminded that ours is a beautiful but increasingly fragile planet. We mustn't fuck it up. We don't have one spare.

And now it's your turn. Can you add to my list? Do you have any hot, eco-friendly pervertables the world ought to know about? Any green sex toy companies to recommend? Any pictures of, say, David Beckham in the buff and acting like he's carbon neutral? Then do please share.

NOW! The nekkid Becks pictures NOW!

Kristina X

The Pleasure of Unpleasure

by Kristina Lloyd
All writers get bad reviews. If you write erotica, your sexuality gets reviewed as well. Trust me, you sometimes need a thick skin to deal with this. We are all, as individuals, never more vulnerable than when we reveal our desiring selves to others, and smut writers do this on a grand scale. Sure, it’s framed within a fiction and no one can see us blush. But with that distance comes a space which allows strangers to pass judgement.

Here are a few things that have been said about me. I mean, about my books:

Most of the sex scenes are degrading - not arousing.

Great if you like the idea of being humiliated and called slut etc., not so great if you don't.

Ilya is a man who truly doesn't respect Beth in the least, doesn't even like her.

You would think that an erotic fiction book would be at least a little bit sensual

I pitied Beth more than I wanted to be in her place.

One of the worst Black Lace books I have ever read.

I found some of the BDSM disgusting.

Nothing against a kinky read but I don’t like mental abuse in erotic books.

Ouch!

My grumble isn’t really with negative comments; I think it’s par for the course when you’re a writer. And I’m pleased to report, they’re vastly outnumbered by the very many positive, insightful, considered reviews my work has received over the years.

No, my problem is with the way erotic humiliation is so frequently misunderstood, reviled and marginalised. I write a lot about women who get off on being used, degraded and verbally dominated; about rape fantasy; about discomfort, conflict, fear. Pain isn’t my kink. Spanking is off my radar. Rough stuff and psychological humiliation is more my theme although, of course, the physical and the mental don’t form neat parcels for anyone. When I write about this and someone says 'Ew! Gross!', they're saying that what turns me on is wrong.

An editor once reminded me that erotic fiction needs to focus on pleasure rather than be a vehicle for dysfunction. I was so stunned by this I didn’t eat worms for the rest of the week and almost quit my basket-weaving. I am not dysfunctional. I am not damaged. And what on earth is ‘pleasure’ anyway? It sounds suspiciously like scented candles to me. The notion that female erotica should be softer and more romantic is wildly offensive. Ditto the implication that a women who wants to be dominated by a man must be lacking her own mind. She doesn’t want it. She’s merely a victim and it’s her damaged, self-loathing psyche talking. Oh, purlease.

I get a lot of pleasure from unpleasure, from being made to squirm, from hating it and loving it all at once. All those who are with me, say ‘Ay!’ One of the most moving erotic scenes I’ve ever read is in Stephen Elliott’s My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up. The narrator, a male submissive new to the BDSM scene, after hours of being tied, gagged, hurt and demeaned is fucked with a strap-on. Elliott writes:

I had never been entered before. She leaned across my back, wrapping one arm around my chest and gripping my neck with her other hand, occasionally squeezing my windpipe so I couldn’t breathe for a second. I cried again, but it was a different crying. I was very comfortable. I don’t think I had ever been comfortable before.

'Comfortable' might seem an odd word to use in this context but I think it’s perfect. For me, it’s that sense of dreamy, egoless relief that arises in the tension between pleasure and unpleasure. Subspace, to use the jargon. A lot of my characters (jeez, I can’t think who they’re based on) get off on being treated badly, on being distressed, reduced, shamed and scared. They’re not screwballs, nihilists, emotional masochists or lacking in self-worth. It’s a sex thang. They can still function.

Beth, my central character in Asking for Trouble, is a woman exploring her taste for sleaze, danger, submission and humiliation. Ilya is the enigmatic stranger she’s newly involved with. She confesses her fantasies to him: ‘I just like picturing things where I’m being used, objectified, degraded, that kind of stuff. It’s liberating. I’m in someone else’s hands. I’m not being me.’

Once upon a time, academics wrote about Black Lace books and the new phenomenon of women writing porn. One academic, analysing Asking for Trouble, quoted the above dialogue and said, ‘So once again then, we see in the woman who liberates her sexuality and embraces eroticism the simultaneous flight from selfhood.’

Guh? Flight from selfhood? Isn’t half the point of sex the way in which we can transcend ourselves? (What’s the other half? Someone remind me? Oh yes: cock.) In Split, my spooky puppets and bondage novel out early next month (US, January), I explore what submission and degradation mean a little bit more. Kate is falling in love with Jake, the strange and beautiful curator of an isolated puppet museum in the Yorkshire Moors. She’s gradually coming to understand how the power imbalance of their sexual relationship fulfils her:

He breaks me down, strips me of inhibitions and when I’ve sobbed and climaxed until I don’t know who I am, he wraps me in his arms, so soft and tender.

Do I sound like a masochist? I don’t feel like one. The point isn’t the pain and I don’t suffer. Or rather, I go beyond suffering and into a new space. If I could get there without it hurting, I would. I think that’s why I like it when Jake calls me ‘slut’ and makes me feel bad. It takes me there, helps me lose myself […] and it’s as if I’m in a nothing space, floating. I am so free there.

It’s such a feeling to be free of yourself. I didn’t understand it at first. I think it scared me but I’m getting to know and understand it. I’m coming to realise that I want this not because I’m worthless and I must suffer. It’s because I’m human and life’s tough. Letting go is so powerful. Surrender transforms me. I adore oblivion.

Kate, like Beth, is a woman conflicted about her sexuality. I think this is true of a lot of people whose kinks are on the dark side, and I think this is OK. We hear a lot about ‘sex positivity’ and having a ‘healthy’ attitude; and while I applaud the sentiment it leaves me feeling a tad uncomfortable. It seems so neat, clean and tidy, and leaves little space for angst or doubt. Where we want to go and what we want to do or be done to us can be disturbing, terrifying, upsetting and exciting. It’s pleasure but not as they know it. Accepting conflict and contradiction is a significant part of accepting our messy sexual selves. I’m sure ‘sex positive’ was originally meant to encompass this but it’s easily miscast to imply unproblematic happy-jolly-fucky sex. It can make me feel dirty, and not in a good way.

I like brutes and bullies with a nice line in contempt. I like back alleys, seediness and squalor. I like scary scenarios that make my heart beat faster. All these things break down the ego and strip away the veneer of the civilised self. And when you’re without that constructed identity, when your dignity and self-respect have been put on hold, then boundaries shift, inhibitions are lost. If anything, those who like to indulge in being broken down need to have a very secure sense of self. They must be continually piecing themselves back together again afterwards.

I imagine a scene. To some eyes, it may look like a woman on her knees in a crack den, sobbing in shame with her hair full of piss, being mocked by a couple of thugs. But for plenty of people, suffering and degradation is intensely erotic. It’s the pleasure of unpleasure, of being split between yes and no. I like it there. I’m comfortable. The scented candles can go hang!