posted and copyrighted March 8, 2005

Dear Nina and Rita,

First of all, I love the site! Great job. My question is how can I get my husband to humiliate me without freaking him out? He spanks me, binds my wrists, he isn’t a prude in other words but making me stand in a corner for being ‘bad’? Or drinking and eating from a dog bowl, forced to sit at his feet and follow him around like a dog because I deserve nothing more…I’m so excited just thinking about it but bringing it up to him, I’m too shy! How can I make him think it is his idea?

Signed,
Miha

Dear Miha,

That you are too embarrassed to ask your husband to humiliate you is one of the great ironies of the human condition. There’s nothing wrong with wanting what you want. But you need to own up to your desires. No one needs to validate them for you, and no one can discredit them either. This is a significant moment in your life because you have realized what you want in the bedroom and are ready to take the necessary steps towards your goal.

If your husband spanks you and ties you up, there’s a 62% chance that he’ll be interested in erotic humiliation and an 88% chance that he’ll want to try erotic role playing. But when he married you, he promised to "love, honor, and cherish you as my wife," not to "treat you like the worthless, servile dog that you are," so he might be afraid to bring it up for fear of offending you.

Light bondage and spanking are very commonly the introductory activities that inspire couples to explore the world of BDSM. What is BDSM? It’s an abbreviation that beautifully expands like peacock’s tail or an adjustable spreader bar to form three pairs of keywords:

Bondage and Discipline (emphasizes the activities)

Dominance and Submission (emphasizes the power dynamics)

Sadism and Masochism (emphasizes the sensations)

It sounds like your current fantasies are mostly structured around dominant and submissive roles in the bedroom, and usually there’s some overlap with the other areas, too. Pet/Owner is a classic role-playing scenario in the BDSM lifestyle. Learning more about BDSM will give you and your husband a safe space to explore your fantasies. You will learn how to talk about what you what, how to articulate your boundaries, and how to start and end a scene, so that you can comfortably resume your regular roles as equally empowered spouses after he has made your play fetch with a large rubber dildo.

We bring all of this up because BDSM gives you a context and an anchor for framing your desires, and it gives him a way to see where his own fantasies fit in to the picture. In other words, you’re not just saying, "I want you to treat me like a puppy dog," you're also saying, "Let’s look into this realm of alternative sexuality so that we can have fulfilling sex for the rest of our lives, fueled by our evolving desires and imagination."

Next weekend, after your husband unties you, why don’t you ask him if he’d like to go further with this kind of thing? And yes, for now you can be vague and say, "Would you like to go further with this kind of thing?" If he’s amenable, there are all sorts of options, depending on your personalities. If, like Rita, you are the kind of people who like to learn how to do things before you do them, then we recommend that you find a couple of guidebooks like Violet Blue’s Ultimate Guide to Sexual Fantasy and William Henkin and Sybil Holiday’s Consensual Sadomasochism. Plus, you can attend workshops in some large cities for hands-on training. Here is a workshop being held in San Francisco at Good Vibrations in June, and it sounds perfect for you:

Games People Play: Erotic Role-Play in the Bedroom
Bring the fun of fantasy play into the bedroom and invigorate your love life with role-play. Erotic adventurers Angela and Iain will show you a range of specific games and how to make them easy and hot. They’ll also talk about finding costumes, overcoming shyness, and working with your imagination. You’ll leave with several games to play, from mild to wild, and ways to make up many more of your own.

If you’re more like Nina, and prefer to extract your fantasies from hot fiction and sexy films, then you and your husband can underline sections from A.N. Roquelaure’s Sleeping Beauty series and Sara Adamson’s The Marketplace, and pick your favorite scenes from Secretary, starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal. These days you can also find lots of role-playing fantasies described in the blogosphere, like Sarah B’s Submissive Reflections. You can send each other links to browse. Once you and your husband are on the same page, so to speak, your power of suggestion will be very, um, powerful.

Doesn’t this sound much more exciting than wishing your husband could read your mind? After all, getting someone to think it's their idea is actually harder than just owning up and being straightforward. If you’re determined to take the passive-aggressive, manipulative approach, the key is to drop hints but not the "wink wink nudge nudge" kind. Hints should be phrased using a rhetoric of selfishness so that it doesn’t seem like you want anything from him. For example, suppose you and your husband are sitting on a bench Saturday morning, waiting for your name to be called at your favorite brunch restaurant. You point towards a dog, a terrier mix, who is sniffing the bushes nearby. "I wonder what it would be like to be a dog," you say casually, as if you might be saying, “Let’s stop at the grocery store because we’re out of soy milk.”

"Sleeping all day, oh yeah, that would be a nice life," he says.

You pretend to think for a moment and then you say, "Yeah but what about the humiliating part of being a dog? You know, eating from a bowl on the floor." Pause thoughtfully, then continue, "It’s funny but I get this feeling that I might enjoy it. Having to sit and heel and follow you around all the time." Then chuckle softly, glance shyly at him with a small smile, while twirling a strand of your hair with your finger. If he's paying attention, he will have a confused look on his face. That’s your cue to announce, "I think I’ll go get the newspaper while we’re waiting." Leave him there alone to figure out what the hell just happened, and voila, a hint has been dropped like an All-Weather Global Positioning Precision-Guided Bomb.

All our love and more,
Nina and Rita