I’ve been excessively interested in spanking for as long as I can remember. However, I didn’t fully embrace my full kinky sexuality until I was forty. I’d been celibate for quite a while but when I re-entered the dating scene, I knew I was a spankophile and wanted relationships that reflected that.

I didn’t at that point consider myself a submissive. I didn’t like the term ‘submissive’. It sounded too much like ‘doormat’ for my liking. When I set up my FetLife profile, I elected to call myself a masochist rather than a submissive. I just like being hit hard on bottom, I reasoned, I don’t want to be owned or controlled.

(It’s funny that ‘masochist’ has come to be widely understood as meaning someone who simply enjoys pain without all the other D/S stuff. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch who gave his name to the word ‘masochism’ is most famous for his book Venus in Furs. His protagonist, Severin, is about as submissive as you can get. He wants to be humiliated and degraded.)

Anyway, somewhere along the line, I realised that I absolutely am a submissive. It’s not just the pain I crave. It’s the ritual. In the moment – and especially when my Dom puts wrist cuffs or a collar on me – my mind will happily switch on its submissive setting. This became especially apparent recently when I slipped into subspace when spanking was barely involved at all.

I’ve experienced the wonderful, otherworldly, feeling-like-you’re-on-mind-altering-substances pleasure of subspace before. But that has always been after a long and protracted spanking session, usually when we’ve hired a dungeon for the afternoon and devoted several hours to the business of beating my arse.

This time, all it took was several lengths of rope. There was something about being tied up, obeying my Dom’s instructions, (“Turn around.” “Lift up your arms and place your hands on your head”) and feeling my body become more and more constricted as the rope wound around me (with special and extremely painful attention being paid to my nipples) that really did it for me.

By the time he was done, I was away with the fairies. Utterly calm, utterly happy and utterly spaced out. It came as a surprise to both of us. My sense of surprise came a lot later than his, obviously. I needed to be untied, cuddled, and given a cup of tea before my brain could return to any semblance of normality.

I don’t expect we’ll be able to replicate it every time but it’s proof (if proof were needed) that whatever it is I crave, it’s not just about the pain. That rope-tying scenario sent a clear messages to the kinky, submissive part of my brain. And that bit of my brain responded wholeheartedly.