  Amazonia brought up the subject of fathers and the damage their absence or disdain can do to a daughter's self-image. Does this play a part in drawing us into a cyclical greek tragedy wherein each new sexual partner is required to punish and praise us like a benevolent patriarch? And is each rejection the re-enactment of that first and most painful of rebuffs? I have my disagreements with Dr. Freud but, where he addressed issues of how parental relationships help mould sexual development, the old boy said some interesting things. Also, blaming your parents for all your woes is fine when your 16, but it wears a little thin by the time you hit 30.
So, threadbare though this post might be, I'm going to indulge, because I do think it partially addresses the wounds that some women who are submissive seek to heal, over and over. A Portrait of My Father My father was the product of his own horrific childhood. He was sent to "Canterbury School for Boys" at the age of 6 where he was beaten, raped and tortured by "prefects", as a "fag", in the time-honoured tradition of all good English public schools (yes, that is the origin of the word "fag" as it is used today). On school holidays, he had no respite. One summer, during the war, his family retreated from the bombing of London to an hotel in Torquay - a smug, quiet seaside resort in the South of England. It was there that his father hung him off the balcony by his ankles and threatened to drop him unless his wife coughed up enough money to enable him to buy his way into the Foreign Legion. (Incidentally, he got the money, joined up, and then had to be bought out, at a later date, suffering from hepatitis and ennui. ) On reaching the age of majority, my father found that a vast sum of money, left to him in trust by his grandfather, had been embezzled. By his own mother and his recently-acquired step father. My father became a writer, a playwright, and a journalist and married a woman who resembled his own mother as little as possible.
Sexually, my mother confided in me that he was inhibited and constantly guilt-ridden. She surmised that, given the opportunity, my father would have taken gladly to the cruel whip hand of some disdainful and severe mistress with the deep-seated relief of a duck slipping into a pond. To her knowledge, he never indulged. More's the pity; he probably would have been a far better father had he done so. That is not to say that he wasn't, until I hit puberty, a good father; he was a fabulous dad until then. My Relationship with Him I suffered badly and chronically from the croup as a child. My father would often come into my room with five furry hand puppets and perform the whole of Dylan Thomas' "Under Milkwood" for me.
He would hunker down with me, under a towel, and patiently coax deep breaths of the mentholated steam by making up hysterical limericks -- I'd belly laugh and pull the steam down into the bottom of my lungs. He once took me on a hike up a mountain near El Escorial, in Spain. When we got to the summit, he created a little stupa of stones, one laid neatly on top of the other.
Then, he took out a couple of scraps of paper and a pen and we sat, composing messages of great importance and depth to leave sandwiched between the rocks for the next explorer who happened by. Land-locked messages in bottles, if you will. If I have any creativity in my soul, I owe the majority of it to my father. Then, I became pubescent. A shadow the size of the Jupiter eclipsed my father's affection for me. I use the word 'eclipsed' because it was exactly like that; it happened by degrees, imperceptibly, over time.
One day, it suddenly occurred to me that he just didn't love me any more. He hadn't withdrawn or become aloof; he became, in fact, altogether too present. He was critical and cruel in those ways only extremely intelligent men can be. He didn't say I was ugly – he simply hinted at ways in which I might improve my looks. He didn't call me stupid but, following some comment I made at the dinner table, would don the sad and weary expression of someone very disappointed in the lack of intelligence so clearly and painfully obvious to him. He had this wan smile that could slice off my face and drop it onto the plate in front of me like a samurai sword – clean, surgical and complete. From 13 to 16, I fought valiantly to win back his affection. I left carefully typed poems of deep existential angst on his bedside table. At first, he didn't mention them at all. Later, when I begged for a reaction, he'd say: "Well, dear, I'm sorry to have to say this but they're really bad…they're utter crap.
You do want to hear the truth, don't you? You wouldn't want me to lie and say they were good, just to make you feel better. " One Sunday morning, at the age of 16, our small family gathered around the dinning room table, eating brunch and reading various parts of the Sunday papers - this was a fixed and time-honoured ritual. I suddenly announced that, having reached the age of permission, I was going to do the responsible and mature thing and go on the Pill. My father glanced up from his Times Literary Supplement and said, "You fucking slut! " My mother (until then a physically comforting if somewhat unbalanced influence on my life), stood up quietly, walked around the table, made a fist and hit him so hard that his chair tipped backwards, smashing his head against the wall. Without stopping to notice whether he was fully conscious or not, she stood over him and muttered: "If I ever hear you refer to our daughter that way again, I'll slit your fucking throat with a kitchen knife. " A little pause here is necessary to underscore that this was the only incidence of physical violence I ever witnessed in my family life.
I would also like to explain that both my father and mother were routinely and shockingly foul-mouthed; the first coherent word to slip across my younger brother's infant lips was "shit! " That incident convinced me that no amount of cleverness, prettiness or devotion on my part was likely to win back my father's affection. As a presence or an influence on my life, he simply ceased to exist. Within six months, having finished school rather early, I moved out and proceeded to do what all good teenagers do: I fucked a lot, did a ton of drugs, and joined a very loud, very offensive band.
Latency Quite a few years later, I had, by necessity, a very short fling with a fellow musician. In the midst of a particularly energetic fuck, my partner looked down at me, smoothed my face with his hand and said, "Good girl…" For those of you who haven't been terribly promiscuous yet, I should warn you: bursting into tears in the middle of what, for all intents, is a one-night-stand is in very, very poor taste. It's simply not done! Especially during an overwhelming orgasm that comes hard on the heels of hearing those words (yes, I noticed the pun – no it wasn't intentional). Oh, what a sick little remittance girl I am! urlLink Read more! 
