{Estragon} Fashion's Slave (femdom)

[Ole Joe]

FASHION'S SLAVE, I
By Estragon

(for adults only)

"When the girls visit," Julia said, "I want them to be treated
like queens...."

"Like empresses," I said, raising the ante.

"Like women," Julia said, winning the hand.

"Strain?" I asked. "Pain?"

"Strain definitely," Julia said. "Pain, we'll have to see."

We have this silly verse, Julia and I. We call it The Circle of
Service: "Brain, strain, pain, brain." You could call it a mnemonic
device for the submissive classes. But, of course, we submissives
shouldn't need it. I didn't question Julia about "brain" because it's
first and last and there's no submission without it. You don't have to
mention brain. Sometimes we add "chain" to make real doggerel of it. Just
for the rhyme, since Julia isn't into heavy metal. (But she can work
wonders, believe me, with lashing cords, web belts, and silk sashes. I
love the last of these best: feminine but strong.)

All three of Julia's sisters were coming to town for a weekend
shopping-spree. I'd met them all before and already half-adored them, but
they'd never had a chance to witness Julia and my life together. To my
taste, there's nothing better than serving a group of women, especially
if they're close friends or sisters. Alone with your girlfriend, if you
get embarrassed after saying and doing unmanly things, you can always
pretend it was some kinky adventure, some "role-playing game," and strut
bravely away. Of course you want to get past such defensive stunts as
early as you can and just bite the bullet and kiss her lovely feet. But
my point is that, with a clique of women watching you go under, you can
never deny what's happening, whether you're embarrassed or not. Two,
three, four, a dozen girls have watched your tribulations, maybe joined
your own sweet mistress in causing them. But Julia and I had only been
together for a year. I'm older, I'm more experienced. We'd shared
fantasies about displaying my humility to all kinds of women, to her
friends, to my employees, to strangers on the train, to entire
sisterhoods of women and girls. But we had never enacted any, and I was
too shy to push the envelope of fantasy and possibly rouse Julia's
suspicion that she was not enough for me. She does have a jealous streak.
She certainly talked a good slave-share. But I wasn't ready to call her
on it.

And I didn't have to. "Any slave of mine is a slave of my
sisters," she explained.

"Understood," I said, as though the heavenly words were no
different from all my other marching-orders.

"The girls know all about our...ah...enlightened relationship,"
Julia said. "All you have to do is live up to my boasts."

"I'll do everything to try, ma'am," I said. My erection grew
stiffer at the thought. It jigged a bit. Julia's eyes glanced downward
and briskly registered the fact, but she didn't bother to comment. Did I
mention that it was "naked hour," the time on weekday afternoons when I'm
expected to shed my clothes and report, briefless, for a briefing?
Basically, this is when I'm given my agenda, my orders. Everything is
businesslike. I'm naked, but I'm not supposed to expect any sexual
attention. The idea is that serving is the deepest sex, and anything else
isn't worth mentioning. Erection - taken for granted. Droplets on my
glans - nothing new in a man who likes his work. I think I could shoot a
double round of semen right there, and Julia wouldn't miss a beat. Go
right on reviewing, right on instructing. Of course, it hasn't happened.
And I'm not the sort of man who comes without permission anyhow. But the
point holds. "Naked hour" is for business.

"Pain, we'll have to see," Julia repeated. "I don't know how far
we can go on their first visit. But we'll certainly cover - or uncover -
the important things."

It was so like my gifted girl to put it this way. Pain really is
the least of it, although it makes the biggest splash with newcomers.
(Not always a splash they welcome, though.) But in a real relationship
it's like the detente, the neat little click that assures that everything
is in place - everything being a woman's freedom from fear and a man's
freedom from freedom. "Pain is a flower," a poet said. It's sweet when
your mistress blithely subjects you to a little pain. But why? Because
you show her by the way you endure the trial that she can ask anything of
you and not need to hear your answer.

"Strain" is shorthand for most of "the important things." Julia
takes them seriously. They're what a woman cares most about, she says,
next to "brain" itself, of course. It's what gives us men an individual
bid on a woman's attention. Submission isn't just show-biz, cringing and
fawning and florid honorifics. It's the dirty work, it's making her life
easier, running her errands, doing her windows. In my case it's cooking
her meals too, a "strain" which, given my culinary gifts, isn't all that
strenuous. I secretly think that Julia stays with me because she can't
resist my cooking. She's a beautiful young woman, nearly half my age, and
she could have a whole regiment in service if she wanted to. I admit that
I'm also a deft cunnilinguist, and that probably helps my cause, but a
woman as lovely as Julia could make a fine oral artist out of a clod.
She's pure inspiration. Her delicate lips, her scent, her sweet nub of
pleasure peering from its hood - they're an instant education. I think of
them, merely think of them, and I lose my thread. As the reader will
notice....

"It's the mood I care about," Julia said, "the humility. No
privacy for you, total privacy for the girls. Going overboard to meet
their every wish. Treating them like princesses...."

"Empresses...," I interject, but she's not joking now.

"...until they feel free to act like spoiled brats with you. They
need it," she says with feeling, "they fucking need it, Steve." Her
sisters' troubles were getting her down. They've always been very close,
the Bergman girls. They're very close in age, not more than two years
apart, so Daniella, the eldest at twenty-seven, is only five years older
than Michelle, the youngest. Lilly's twenty-six and Julia's twenty-four.

"I just wish they could act like bratty little cunts with you,"
Julia said.

"I'm into it," I said, "really."

"Girls need it," Julia said, "we just need it. I mean cunty,
spoiled things. The kind of things well-bred girls don't do. Obnoxious,
not sexy - but sexy to you, Steve. I want them to be sexy to you. Real
whiney 'peel me a grape' stuff."

I was finding the idea very sexy indeed. If you're really into
adoring women, you don't ask them to charm you. They're women, for God's
sake. That's already more charm than you have a right to.

"My sisters are such sweet girls," Julia said. This was true.
Julia's sisters were both beautiful and gracious. "Such sweet girls, and
thanks to dad they've learned to ask very little of a man. Mark is such a
shit." Lilly's boyfriend, Mark. "And Dani's got a thing for two-timers.
And don't get me going on Michelle and the beer-bellies she thinks are
men."

"I'm flattered to be the alternative," I said. I remembered
Julia's stories about how she and Lilly, who shared a bedroom as girls,
used to fantasize together about having a naked man nearby who catered to
their every wish. They were adolescent girls, yet they imagined, not a
boy their own age, but a full-grown man who worshipped and obeyed them.
"Your sisters aren't exactly hayseeds," I said. "They're sophisticated
young women. They must know the score." Julia said they knew it and they
didn't. They have a way of not seeing what's in front of their nose.
"Like most girls," she said.

The thought troubled her. "Steve, the weekend is only three days
long," she said, as if pleading. "Can we go for broke? Can we show them
everything?"

"Believe me, sweet mistress," I said. And then, shyly, a second
time: "Pain?"

"Probably," Julia said, and suddenly lightened up. "But don't get
carried away, slaveboy. I'm also imagining lots of peeled grapes."

"Naturally," I said, wondering if Julia noticed the wetness on my
glans. I let a decent interval pass while she collected herself.

"May I describe this evening's menu, ma'am?" I said at last. She was
all ears.

Did I mention, reader, that all this time I'd been kneeling at
her feet?

end of part one

FASHION'S SLAVE, II

(for adults only)

Julia spent the remainder of the week dreaming aloud about the
great show of servitude I was going to put on for her sisters that
weekend. While we made love, as I knelt at the foot of our bed, bound
ankle and wrist with two of her silk sashes, probing her slitted secret
with my tongue, coaxing her quicksilver clit from its hood - through all
this, Julia would multiply the details of the extravaganza we were going
to stage, firing us both up with images of my sweaty labors and my
unprotesting submission to the whims of gracious women suddenly gone
bitchy. How lovely we both found the fantasy of giddy girls slapping my
face and my incorrigible penis at will, for the mirth of it. Carefree
women traipsing over my rug-like body in their delicate pumps, making
sure to crush my penis or pinion my testicles as they strode. As Julia
lay me on my back, still bound, as she added a blindfold in the form of
her perfumed t-shirt or chemise, as she mounted me and imperiously drew
my penis into her - all the while, she'd be whispering vivid scenarios,
which I could almost live and breathe, of my humility before Daniella, my
shameless, clumsy campaign to please Michelle, my prostration at Lilly's
feet.

At the end of the evening, when Julia had to make her nightly
decision whether to let me ejaculate, she would curtly decide against it,
three nights in a row, an unusual severity in our relationship. She said
I would need all that concentrated manhood to live up to our weekend
plans. And I agreed. I truly agreed. I yearned to have every wild word of
Julia's vision come true.

But how could it, really? We were talking about a meager
three-day weekend, and one much occupied with shopping. And we were
talking about civilized girls, with a penchant for giving men their way
and an unfortunate taste for men who liked having it. It didn't seem very
probable that they would turn heartless overnight. That's an idea in
pornography - under the veneer of civilization there's a savage sexual
hunger struggling to be appeased. All you have to do is press a button,
scratch a surface. Do it, and women like Daniella will tear off their
business-suits and devour the helpless cocks of their law-partners. Do
it, and brokers like Lilly will get more bullish than their terrified
clients can bear. But it's a fable. The awful thing about desire is that
we manage to keep it under wraps even when it's as urgent as life itself.
There are people who like separating their fantasies from reality.
They're proud of the achievement. That's well enough when your fantasies
are ugly. But women's rule is never ugly. So I don't want my fantasies in
quarantine. If a fantasy gets too fantastic, I'm turned off. I'm a guy
who has to remind himself that movie-stars are real women with working
cunts. No curtain ever closes on my submission to Julia. It's reality,
it's everyday life.

But spreading the curtain for Julia's sisters was another thing.
Wouldn't our zealous intentions simply dissolve the minute they were
exposed, erased by cowardice and affability, dissipated in the courtesies
of luggage-handling, the weariness of jet-lag, the wholesomeness of
family-reunion? How on earth do you get from, "Wonderful to see you
again" to "Would mistress care to clobber me now?" Too many moves for a
three-day whirl.

By Friday, the girls' arrival-day, I was nothing but service and
tender solicitude toward all of womankind. Julia's refusal to let me come
for three whole nights had left m sensitive as a watch-spring. My balls
were heavy and my penis felt like a truncheon, dense and weighted yet
quick. Three days of Julia's mincing strokes had left it permanently
lubricated. A single moment's pressure on my lurching organ would have
been enough to make me shoot. But Julia knew how to play me. She'd
trained my entire nervous system to forward every sensation of my body to
my penis. Touch me anywhere, dear woman, as casually as you like, brush
by me and let the little breeze you make in passing flutter the hairs on
my forearm, and my penis will twitch and quiver for you like a windsock
in a squall. My taut reflexes were perfect for the duties of the day,
which involved visiting three ternals to fetch Julia's sisters. One
airport for Lilly, a second for Michelle, and between the two a rail
station to meet Daniella. And lots of travel-time between the three. But
I drove like a master, while Julia, sitting beside me, her hand flitting
over my lap, demurely shifted my gears.

"Julia, we'll have an accident if you keep that up," I said at
some point.

"I think ypu've had one already," Julia said, circling with her
finger a little dampness in my pants. "But you're right, Steve, I don't
want you to have a big one. Anyhow, you know how gorgeous Lilly is...."

"I don't think I'm going to come at first sight, if that's what
you mean," I said.

"Just remember," Julia said, "this weekend you exist not just for
me but for my sisters. The only pleasure you know is the pleasure of
serving them. If you're going to have an accident - and I'd rather you
didn't - but if you're going to, it had better be because you're
deliriously happy under the weight of women's bags." Julia had the
sexiest mind on earth. It wasn't hard at all to imagine my penis gushing
in helpless joy as I struggled clumsily with a brace of suitcases.

As we waited at the gate for Lilly, Julia offered me one final
piece of instruction. "Find a way, Steve, to kneel to her. I mean right
here, right away. Find a way to do it."

Lilly was a world-class beauty. She was a little taller than
Julia, who is of average height but leggy, and with a longer version of
the same fine, dark, glowing hair. Her eyes were round, her brows
delicate, her skin soft and slightly flushed, the muscles of her face
perfectly toned. Lilly had the wide, sensual mouth of her clan. She wore
bright lipstick, perfectly applied with a clean crimson edge. There was
something crisp and delineated about her. Not just her face but her lean,
athletic body as well. She was wearing a cropped, sleeveless shirt, tight
black jeans, and canvas boots. Her breasts were high, her mound was high,
below her shirt there was a margin of flat, firm stomach. At her waist
you could see the curve of her hips just descending into her jeans. She
was sex and womanliness itself, but the amazing thing was that she was
abstract beauty too. Or she was the place where beauty changes from a
pleasure of the animal senses, a matter of touch and smell, to something
visual and ideal. Lilly was more contour than cunt. She was bends and
rises and planes. What if it turned out that she had, as those jeans that
showed a man no pity suggested, only the terse pubis of an angel, smooth,
sealed, unwelcoming? Then still she would excite frenzied desire, desire
that only the eye had any hope of allaying and even then no hope of
satisfying. She strode, almost ran, toward Julia and me with easy grace,
yet nothing about her was careless. Her sleeveless top was slender, but
no hint of a bra-strap appeared on her shoulder. Nothing could possibly
slip from place on Lilly, yet everything sat lightly on her, even her
skin-tight pants.

Lilly's smile was large and brilliant. Her hair leapt about her
beautiful face. There was too much glory, too much femininity, to take
in.

"Isn't she gorgeous?" Julia asked without a hint of envy as Lilly
came through the gate.

"I adore her," I said. "Please, Julia, make her see it."

To absorb all of Lilly was too devastating. I had to concentrate
on a single thing. I love it that women shave under their arms, so when
Lilly called out to her sister and waved I focused on what her wave
revealed. Which was, that she had shaved with pride. How else can I put
it? She was depilated as a woman would be if she wanted to put as much
distance as possible between her sex and the other. She was depilated as
she would naturally be if men and women were truly different species. A
woman who gives daily prayers of thanks for her womanhood, who shudders
when she recalls the narrow odds of being born a girl - such a woman
would shave as Lilly had. A woman who felt the perfect sweetness of
having female flesh and blood.

Julia and Lilly fell into a good long hug. Their show of sisterly
warmth, involving as it did the crushing of breast against breast, gave
me an erection. It's hard for a man to believe that women just take for
granted the features that weaken men's knees. Yes, their power to
enthrall us means something to them, but they have to step outside of
themselves to enjoy it. They may understand how to use it, they may have
practical skill, but they don't know any more than we do what it is or
how it works. They don't know the theory. Nobody knows the theory. Julia
and I have discussed all this many times.

"Of course," she says, "like any girl, I get some pleasure from
my effect on men. A little charge from seeing them go goofy just because
of how I look. A little amusement from watching them fall over themselves
trying to please me. That doesn't mean I want it to happen, let alone
that I take the trouble to make it happen. I look down over my so-called
'charms'. I mean, my breasts - they're just there. I've learned to value
them, but really they're just my breasts. Just me. My hips, my
legs....They're what I walk on, you know. Julia's legs. That's it. I
don't really understand what drives men wild about them. Not really. I
mean, I've learned that they're nice as legs go, but, come on, they're
just mine."

"'The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,'" I say, "'Though
to itself it only live and die'."

"Yeah, like that," Julia laughs and once again we leave the
mystery unsolved.

And the mystery is compounded when you're confronted with more
than one beauty at a time. (That's why I love living in a city big and
worldly enough to have two airports: in good weather, the streets are
rife with mystery, and the pressure of populous femininity on an average
man in good health is enough to give him the bends. It surprises me that
I'm off my knees at all. I don't know why we're not all sinking all the
time in sweet agony.) In the presence of a lone beauty, whether she's a
total stranger or the woman you serve, there is always a part of you
deciding that she is a unique being, an exception to the rule and
therefore not really ENTITLED to rule. Of course you know better, but
part of you flees to this idea all the same, turning beauty into some
kind of monstrosity. Beauty would stop being beauty if it were unique,
just as a cunt would stop being sexy if it were the only one (I don't
mean the last one) on earth. But put as few as two enchanting women
before my eyes, and beauty becomes a trend, the thing that womanhood's
about. It stops seeming the odd attainment of an individual and shows
itself for what it is, the realization in woman after woman of
invincible, universal femininity.

That's how it was for me staring, erect and probably seeping, at
Julia and Lilly as they greeted one another. Their shared features were
more specific, of course, because they were sisters, but this just
amplified my sense of the power of women in numbers. I thrilled as they
pressed themselves to one another, Julia on her toes for the purpose,
their breasts, their stomachs meeting solidly. Their behinds were so
alike that, seen from the side, their embracing bodies had a lovely
symmetry - the same concavity at the small of their backs, the same
torque at their hips, the same firm roundness of their buttocks. Their
hairstyles were altogether different, Julia's short and straight, Lilly's
long and wavy. But on the top of their heads one could see the same
whorl, two spirals as startlingly alike as matched finger-prints. I
thought, as I watched their breasts become a single billow, that their
nipples must be alike, and the blades of their slender hips, and their
triangles of pubic hair. What if I had only that triangle to go on? Could
I tell the women apart? I doubted it. Not by sight, not by taste. I
thought, I already know Lilly intimately because I know Julia. I thought,
their clits must look alike, and their vaginas must have the same sweet
scent. So too with Daniella and Michelle. I have yet to lay eyes on them,
but already I know something infinitely deep about them: I know the shade
of their labia, I know the furrows. I know these sisters, I thought, the
things we men try to imagine about women when we gawk, and I felt that
untenable combination of reverence and trespass that always accompanies a
man's voyeuristic indulgences.And I knew that it wasn't right that I keep
this secret advantage.

Julia and Lilly were now holding one another at arm's length,
taking in one another's fit condition. After a few rounds of "I can't
believe how great you look" they began to detach. For a moment Julia
fingered a small laquered pin on Lilly's shirt. "Nice pin," she said,
lavishly plumping the syllables. "Can I just...? Oh, how clumsy of me."
She had - rather obviously, I thought - unfastened the pin and let it
drop to the floor. It was my cue and I didn't miss a beat. Before Julia
could say, "Steve, would you?" I had dived for the the thing. I could
have crouched or even just bent down, but I was already on my knees when
the pin came to rest near Lilly's left foot.

"I have it, ma'am," I said before I could retract the
incriminating turn of phrase. I tried to give it a humorous spin, but it
was gone from my lips before I had the chance. I handed the pin up to
Lilly who turned toward me. Julia beamed down at me. "What did I tell
you?" she asked her sister.

I was at eye-level with Lilly's abdomen. I could have gazed
forever on the gentle rise of her pubis, more accentuated than concealed
by the rich, dark fabric of her pants. To prolong my stay down at her
feet I pretended to notice her boots for the first time. "These are
wonderful boots," I said. "Julia, have you looked." And I let myself
touch them lightly, noting the outline of Lilly's toes within.

"Excuse me, darling," Julia said. "We have another plane to meet.
Besides, I believe the airline only permits foot-worship on the
baggage-level."

end of part two

"Fashion's Slave," III

(adults only)

I rose to receive Lilly's postponed hug of greeting. Even before
she gathered me into her arms I was embraced by her delicate cologne, a
laconic scent, a little more tart than sweet, floral but with a topnote
of citrus, clean and etched as the woman wearing it. It emanated from her
entire body and from her long, weightless hair. What a wonderful
substance perfume is. Yes, I wear cologne myself, a good, sharp, manly
scent, but that's just to show that I'm tame and suitable for service.
Everyone knows that scent is a feminine language, indirect yet
all-encompassing, gentle yet irresistible.

Even at the beginning of time, it must have seemed the most
obvious thing in the world that women deserved the enhancement of scent.
Even - though I shudder to imagine such a time - even before they learned
to shave, women must have discovered the eloquence of perfume. It's
almost an extension of their nature, hardly an artifice at all, and it
gives them command of the very air men breathe. It raises the coarse
sense of smell to human level and teaches even it to know beauty and
revere its origin in women. It invites every profane stranger to glimpse
the feminine mysteries - or it seems to, because it clothes them artfully
and leaves them as elusive as before. It's the net a woman throws out
over us, smartly, effortlessly, drawing us into gracious bondage. It's
the whole enigma of her body. The whole promise, which it is not in the
nature of things to fulfill. Her vagina, that particular thing, that
place all men wish to be, do you really think it's a place, a tangible
organ, which we might take possesion of? Come on, my readers, admit it: a
woman's body is no more ours than the song that keeps fleeing us at the
edge of memory. And, most wonderfully, her perfume says all this at every
moment. Of course, it also says something much simpler. "Kneel," it says,
"kneel, all you men, to your cunted conqueror."

But I had already knelt to Lilly, and Julia and I had done what
we could with our gestures and jokes to make her appreciate the fact.
Still, it was hard to tell what she had taken in. I was helplessly erect
when she took me into her arms in what was, after all, only an exuberant
airport greeting. Unless a woman has explicitly agreed to recognize a
man's erection as a sign of his deference, it's rude, isn't it, to imose
an awareness of his condition on her. Better at such a moment to be
impotent than impudent. But, of course, one reason we men are made for
slavery is that we can't control these things ourselves. When Lilly drew
me close I really did try to hold my pelvis back. It seemed the polite
thing to do, but it ends up making you seem remote and unwilling, and so,
after a moment's resistance, I let myself fall into Lilly's body and my
hard penis gratefully lodged against Lilly's firm pelvis. Even in those
few seconds, Lilly was all-absorbing. I wanted to lose my vision in the
glowing darkness of her hair. And there, amid those clean, sweet locks I
noticed for the first time Lilly's ear-rings, small, shimmering silver
disks, slightly concave.

I could go on about ear-rings. They are one of the world's great
ideas. They show how ironic beauty is capable of being. Fragile tissues
of precious metal, actually fastened to the flesh in tenuous, painless
imitation of bondage and cruelty. If you think about it, this isn't such
a difficult practice to understand. People often turn the symbols of
their real or imposed weakness into badges of pride. (Isn't this just
what we men have always done with our penises in our rebellion against
women's power over us?) That's what jewelry is all about. Chains and
rings and shackles that might once have confirmed the subordination of
women are turned into precious filigree to confirm their freedom, their
dominance. The sight of Lilly's ear-rings did nothing to soften my penis.

"It's so good to see you, Lilly," I said, "so good to have
you...I mean, here with us."

"Stev-vee," she said, teasing out my name in a way that somehow
jolted my erection up a few notches - I haven't been called "Stevie"
since I was a kid and the childish sound was strangely sexy - "Stevie,"
Lilly said, "I think I can tell. I'm happy to see you too. Stev-vee."

Blessedly, Julia intervened, quietly assuring her sister that she
shouldn't mind my erection, Julia was perfectly aware that I had it.
"He's not betraying me, Lilly," Julia said, "he's obeying. A hard-on in a
man is just a kind of 'On Duty' light, sort of like a taxi, except that
for the man service is its own reward. So use my Stevie well." And with
that she told me to take up her sister's bag. As though I had to be told!

It was Lilly who needed persuading. Modern women are like that, a
little insulted at the suggestion that they can't carry their own bags
and open their own doors. But that's not at all what I'm saying when I
offer my assistance. I don't for a minute doubt the strength or
competence of girls. Au contraire. It's what I adore them for, one of the
things anyhow, and so it makes me want to serve them all the more
ardently. "Of course you can do all this yourself," I want to say, "all
this and much more. You can, but you don't have to. You're a queen, a
goddess, and I'm a man. If I want to offer myself to you, I mean if I
must offer myself to you, what else do I have to give but my male brawn?
Some of us can write lyrics in praise of you, in worship rather. But most
of us just have our muscles and bones, so that's what we offer in
service. We don't know what else to do but carry things for you. We're
women's natural porters. We begin by carrying our maleness around for
you, and we end by carrying any freight you'll allow."

"I'm fine," Lilly said. "I've gotten this far."

"He needs to do it, Lilly," Julia said. "He's a man, remember.
Besides, you look a little travel-worn." She didn't look the least bit
worn. She looked fresh from the spa.

"Do I?" she said. She looked worried.

"Does the Pope piss in the woods?" Julia said. Lilly laughed. It
seemed to be an old tag-line between them.

"Okay," she said. "I have to admit, it is one of the nice things
about being a woman that there's always a man nearby to do things for you
if you're feeling lazy."

"Exactly," I said, "I'm on deck for you, Lilly," and Julia said,
"Believe him, Lil, he is."

And it was sexy carrying Lilly's suitcase, which was mysteriously
heavy, as women's bags tend to be - although, when you ask them what on
earth they've brought, it always turns out to be nothing but a little
make-up, a night-gown and underwear and, oh, yes, a few contingency-items
in case they're invited at the last minute to a ball. As we rushed down
the corridor, I had to reflect on the fact that Lilly's intimate things
were mere centimeters from me, just on the other side of the thin
resinous wall of the valise that brushed and knocked against my leg.
Within, I imagined as we trotted to the parking-lot, I myself straggling
a little behind the beautiful, mutually engrossed sisters - within were
wispy fabrics that in the mere routine of things would stretch against
Lilly's skin, matter-of-factly conforming to her feminine surfaces and
folds. Lilly's bras, Lilly's panties, no doubt Lilly's stockings. There
must be a pair of high-heels within, I thought. Possibly a box of tampons
or mini-pads: how could I know there wasn't? Then there would be Lilly's
make-up bag, with its compact and pencils, its tube of lipstick and
bottle of blush, its ampule of lotion, its jigger of cologne - and, of
course, that sacred implement of feminine self-fashioning, its razor.

I was born to serve women. I've known this since Day One of my
sexual life - which began, I'd better explain, on Day Fifteen Hundred
(give or take a few score) of my actual life, when I had my first
miniature erection while staring at a reproduction of a painting (it must
have been a Titian) in which naked boy-children who looked a lot like me,
with juvenile round bellies and tiny curved penises, waited slavishly on
a company of elegantly dressed, supercilious women (goddesses, I now
understand). I remember thinking how fine and sweet and all-consuming it
would be to be one of that brigade of bs.

The mathematical reader will infer just how early my first
fantasy of submission and service occurred, then. And, imagination being
what it is - strange to the outsider, the most natural thing in the world
to oneself - I have ever since taken it for granted that all males feel
as I do, deep down if not right on the surface. If they're not denying
the truth to themselves, they want nothing more than to toil in the
service of women, and when they're given the privilege, there is more
consummation in it than in the most blustery fuck scored within a lie.
What man hasn't had the experience of finding himself in straightforward
intercourse with a woman, lying atop her carrying out his expected
rhythms, and all the while thinking what a deeper and more thrilling
thing it would be if he could be abject at her feet, hearing her orders,
then leaping up and throwing on his clothes and running out into the
world to do her heavy errands, aware all the while that the sweet
mistress has begun to think of him more as an appliance than as a being
much like herself?

In exchange for the vision and scent of a woman's beauty, I am
willing - oh, what a tepid word, "wlling" - I am desperate to obey and
serve her and to announce my submission to the world. The cruelest thing
she can do then is to refuse to acknowledge me. And the kindest thing,
absolutely, is to let me be the porter of every accessory to her
loveliness. Could it be that her luggage takes on that mysterious extra
heft by including the weight of my adoring fantasy of what's within? My
only complaint is that the load isn't heavier still, that the subtle
tissue of cloth and color and rippling metal that she dons so lightly to
hide or show whatever of herself she pleases doesn't somehow gain gravity
the instant it's bagged and handed to a man. How just it would be if
carrying a portmanteau of silky things exhausted a man's body as
thoroughly as the contemplation of the beauty of their wearer does his
mind....

Which is to say, I relished having to lope through the air-port
and down among the cars with Lilly's luggage in hand just as much as I'd
have relished still being up at the gate, holding Lilly in my arms. Just
as much? More, in fact, because this was true service, not a high-toned
promise, not a greedy erection willing to barter more than I own for
another second or two of feminine pressure - this was the pith of
service. Not glamorous, not super-human, but no holiday either. I know
there is the theory that female-domination is a kind of recess strong men
take from their hectic, pressure-ridden lives. Yes, my sly and tireless
shuttle-diplomacy has averted war in the East, and, yes, on the way home
I agreed to stop off and cap a blazing oil-rig, and now, exhausted by my
own heroics, I just need the refreshment of being flogged by a girl in a
corset and jack-boots. What rubbish! Strain and even pain - they're
nothing but signs that a man has lost his will to resist and is putting
on his destined livery. The practical test is work. I felt the pull of
Lilly's suitcase on my arm, the burn in my muscles produced by the
constant need to maneuver the ungainly thing through crowded passageways.
Under normal circumstances, this would not be a pleasant sensation. But
this wasn't mere freight I was carrying. It was a woman's things, Lilly's
things, the manifold complements of her beautiful limbs, the needs of her
skin, the companions of her secrecy. Such a thought is enough to turn any
labor on the woman's behalf into something milder than repose. Ache,
fatigue, the hint of torture inherent in carrying things: in a properly
wired man - and the reader knows I'm one - these "painful" sensations are
converted into lovely arousal. They become as sweet and satisfying and,
most important of all, as arousing as the woman's actual caress. I mean,
they go from the bicep directly to the penis, and the gnawing ache in the
upper arm becomes a delicate titillation elsewhere.

All that's necessary to complete this enchanting circuit is the
woman's own recognition of what one's strain and pain mean. Even if she
understands them as no more than conventional gallantry, her sense of
herself as a being whom men must serve is confirmed. I think Lilly got
the point on a deeper level still. And, more important than that, she
rather liked the lesson. As we hurried through the terminal, the women
gaily chattering and I lurching and dodging a few yards behind, Lilly
turned back now and then to give me an apologetic look - from which Julia
quickly diverted her with the reminder that "he's a man, Lilly, he's a
man." And Lilly would throw up her hands comically, as if to say, "How
silly of me to forget." So the lesson was taking. Julia's good spirits
and her occasional wink in my direction told me that she was happy with
the progress of things.

Behind the wheel I relaxed a bit. The women sat together in the
back seat celebrating the waning of Lilly's romance with Mark, that shit,
while I, their chauffeur, allowed myself a revery on the intimate
features of the Bergman girls. Of course there was nothing but adoration
in my thoughts, but it's hard not to feel a little ashamed at the
knowledge that, while your poker-face seems blankly fixed on the traffic,
your mind's eye is roaming over soft triangles of pubic hair and moist
flanges of labia.

"Men would be lining up around the block just for the chance to
hear you say hello," Julia was explaining to Lilly. "They'd take numbers,
camp out in th rain...."

"....Walk barefoot to Palestine on hot coals," I interjected.

"Stevie's sweet," I heard Lilly say before I drifted back into my
revery. It seemed only minutes later that we were at the gate awaiting
Michelle.

Michelle appeared entirely in white. It looked like medical
school had gotten to her, although she was hardly in scrub-clothes. Her
creamy shirt was made of silk, her skirt was white linen. She wore white
straw sandals with delicate straps and high heels. Michelle was about the
same height as Julia, and there, on her charming face, was the family
mouth, at that moment a full, smiling rectangle filled with perfect
teeth. Julia and Lilly seemed enthralled themselves, and a little
startled, by the chic and sexy vision that darted gracefully, despite a
large valise and high heels, from the gate. Michelle had had her ups and
downs in recent years, but the young woman before us was all competence
and vivacity. Lilly called her "doc," and Michelle said, "Just give me
three years."

There was another round of boisterous hugging, quietly attended
by the erection that displays of sisterly affection always seem to rouse
in me. Michelle was fairer-haired than her sisters, and she had slightly
larger breasts. You could see the frail straps of her bra through the
light silk of her blouse. I was riveted to the sight while her back was
to me. I have a weakness for bras seen from the back; even the outline of
slender straps under a woman's shirt fills me with tenderness for the
woman wearing them. I love the taper of the back-strap, its slight
funicular dip lending at one and the same time a suggestion of tenuous
adornment and working physics. The bra is an elegant piece of engineering
which also happens to be an absolute symbol of femininity. Of course I
love the breasts to whose comfort and form it lends its ingenious aid.
(And it's hard to look at Michelle's high, round, angelic versions of
these orbs without dropping a tear of yearning.) But it isn't the cue
that there are breasts ahead that in itself so affects me in the
back-straps: it's the notice that a general obligation has been , an
obligation that goes with being a woman, and just so happens to include
having breasts, but might for this purpose include any old feature at
all. Just as a woman's hip-bones elicit my special affection just
because, not being organs, their entire function is to serve as
unequivocal signs of femininity, so the straps of a bra, seen from
behind, are in a way absacted from their practical purpose and become (in
this case) the artificial, hence chosen, signs of the feminine.
Supposedly neutral areas of the body, the shoulders and the back, become
steadfast in the cause of gender. Each time a woman closes the clasp, she
is briskly saying, "I am a woman, I accept the fact...I mean, the privilege."

When my turn came round to receive Michelle's hug, I made sure to
plant my hand beneath her shoulders.

end of part three

FASHION'S SLAVE, IV

(adults only)

Michelle is generous with her body. Even a reserved woman has no choice,
if she's hugging you, except to crush her breasts against you. But you
can tell that this isn't the way she'd have it, that she's disconcerted
by this peculiar instance of enforced publicity in a body that seems
otherwise designed for maximum privacy. You can feel such a woman's
indignation somewhere in back of her perhaps genuine cheer at seeing you.
Yes, she's saying to herself, I'm glad to see him, but why must showing
him the fact include making him intimate with my breasts? A perfectly
reasonable question, after all, if only nature were used to giving
reasonable answers.

Michelle is not like this. She seems to want the man she's
greeting to know the loveliness of her breasts. That they are lovely
indeed is a thing she's learned, not something she understands from
within. For most women this is so. Michelle leans into the man. She's not
trying to be seductive, she's not throwing herself at him or even
flaunting her sexuality. It's more as though she's concluded, purely on
the basis of the circumstantial evidence, that these firm and prominent
objects can't possibly be hers to withhold. They're just too...prominent
and firm. Michelle leans benevolently into a man, in a way that doesn't
in the least compromise her sweetness or modesty, as if to say, "If this
isn't what I'm supposed to do with these likeable breasts of mine, then I
can't imagine what is."

And it was glorious to accept her generosity, which she
compounded, as a matter of fact, with the charms of her soft scent and
the touch of her cool, invigorating cheek. In fact, there was nothing
about Michelle that was not pleasing: every sensation she kindled was
complete and consuming. The silk of her shirt, the above-mentioned
outline of her bra, the redness of her lips, her long, almost golden hair
- in a very short time, a man could get quite lost in the sensual
landscape of Michelle.

But not so short a time, I guess, as her sisters would allow.

"Unhand that girl," Julia said. "She's ours.... Besides, Dani's
train is due." Michelle squeezed my arm as she released me and reached
for her valise.

"No, no, no," I said. "Those hands are too gorgeous to carry the
luggage we men were put on earth to, ah, to...lug." But it was true. The
long-boned Bergman women were distinguished for (among other beauties)
their elegant fingers, with their fine taper and shapely tips. Michelle
had in this respect ever so slight an edge on her sisters. Her fingers
were a jot longer, perhaps a touch more tapered, a quaver more sensitive.
With women of this caliber, such small advances on the perfection of one
feature or another are a pleasure to note and make the adoring male (who
doubts, remember, that he could tell one nipple or one pubic swatch from
another) feel like a sudden connoisseur.

So down another airport corridor we ran, the women a few paces
ahead of me, exchanging their news in giddy soprano voices while I
lumbered along with Michelle's bulging suitcase for side-kick and the
vision of six sisterly hips and buttocks to delight, and in a way to
puzzle, me. Yes, that's my theory as to why we men can't stop staring at
women. We simply and literally can't believe our eyes. How can such noble
bends and arcs really be part of flesh-and-blood human beings; how can
there be so much art so close to the bone?

I was still pondering this as we piled into the car. The girls
decided to squeeze into the back-seat, leaving me alone at the wheel in
my chauffeur's revery once more. How charming the Sisters Bergman looked
in the rear-view mirror, each woman's limbs practically yoked to her
companion's. I have to admit that I imagined their thighs similarly
wedged close and tried to picture the abbreviated view one might have of
their pelvises if one could see them naked under these circumstances.
Girls don't have to worry, of course, about putting the squeeze on their
pectineus muscles. By beautiful design, there's nothing there to get
crushed. They can sit demurely even at close quarters (while we men tend,
even when we're sole occupant of our chair, to keep our knees wide apart
in solicitude for our balls, which seem to belong nowhere). So I imagined
(I won't say shamelessly) the width of Bergman hips and the shallow
triangles that then had to have been formed by the juncture of Bergman
thighs. I imagined the creamy skin, slightly moist and fragrant, its
fresh, light color startlingly interrupted only by the ridge of dark
pubic hair, the wide end of the sacred triangle, which remained
unsecluded. Hidden entirely from view - but present, yes, fully, sweetly
present - would be the cleft, the heavenly cleft, the captivating paradox
of the "nothing" that's more real than anything.

I'd say that I free-associated in this way as I drove, but what
was "free" about it? I was spellbound by the fantasy of feminine
mysteries and the delicate garments that veiled them. I was compelled to
wonder about panties, for example. In the last century, it was thought
indecent for women to wear any sort of drawers, and mostly prostitutes
did wear them. I suppose the idea of fabric lovingly adhering to the
vulva scandalized people. Amelia Bloomer's invention was a political
event, a kind of feminism of the loins. The modern panty, a scrap or two
of cotton or silk extended from a waist-band, is hardly more than an
insubstantial auxiliary to nature's own tiny mantle of hair. Thinking of
it, I realized that the distinction between concealment and exposure
cannot feel the same to a woman as it does to a man. We men are always to
some degree exposed - if nothing else, our willy-nilly erections tell all
- and women never are really. A woman, I imagined, must sense herself
always as more or less hidden and, where it counts most, naturally
covered. My whole idea of exposure, I thought, is that of a person with
an erectile cock and vulnerable balls. I had never considered how
different it would have to be for a person equipped with one of those
serene, impassive mounds instead. In a way, if a woman has an idea of her
own exposure, it's just a borrowing from us men: it's a fiction she
throws on, as she might one of our shirts, carelessly, capriciously,
charmingly burlesquing a part she doesn't fit.

So there's a kind of irony behind the scantiness of women's
underclothes, and, for that matter, behind the lightness and fragility of
so much of their street-dress. It's not that they're exposing themselves,
being promiscuous with their flesh. No, it's that, no matter what they
do, they're certainly not exposing themselves; they're simply tormenting
us with the illusion that they are. But that's not it either. Women have
the right to tease us, and, in our hearts, we're happy when they do.
We're grateful to be played with and, beyond that, to be shown that she
who's playing knows that it's hers to make the rules. But we also know
that even she can't change nature. She's made to elude us, to slip from
our grasp and even from our sight. If her power over us is rooted in
nature (as the reader knows I think it is), then it begins in this
perpetual taunting that is the sexual component of the human condition. I
mean, it's unalterable. It's just what happens when a pellet of mind is
dropped, depending, into a caldron of cocked or cunted body. Men seethe
and women keep cool. A woman's total nudity, her uncoy, generous and
clinical display of herself - even that would divulge nothing that would
give a man the least power over her.

Every time I glanced in the rear-view mirror, my heart jumped
with happiness at the vision of the women in back and the thought of
their presence in my home. I melted to imagine the perfumed air of our
apartment, subliminally dosed with womanly pheronomes. I thought that, no
matter which room I entered or which direction I turned, I would be
within inches of someone's angelic breast and sacred vagina. And this
fantasy of x-ray eyes brought my thoughts around again to a revery of
underwear. In the back-seat, the girls were addressing the question of
Michelle's guilt whenever she flirted with men she had no wish to sleep
with. She was admitting that she got a kick out of "toying with guys,"
but didn't she owe them something for the amusement they gave? I listened
and recollected the feel of her bra-strap under my hand and thought that in
that sensation alone she had given me more than I, or any man, had a
claim to. "Sweet girl," I wanted to cry out, "your presence in their
midst is all the gift they need and more than they deserve. Don't you see
this? Believe me, THEY do."

Of course, I myself was greedily reliving the thrill of being at
eye-level with Lilly's pelvis, and of feeling Michelle's breasts firm and
resilient against my chest. "I mean, don't they have a right to be pissed
at me if I leave them at the bar?" Michelle was saying. I observed Lilly
nodding slowly in sympathy with her sister's dilemma.

"You feel you have to give them something, right?" Lilly said.

"Give them something?" Julia said. "You've given them plenty.
You've given them a hard-on. 'Hey, fella, thank the lady!'" The women
laughed freely, though Michelle then said, "I guess."

I smiled too, at Julia's little lesson to her sisters, and at
another recollection of my own...of the last time Julia and I went
shopping together and I found myself waiting with others of my sex as my
beloved mistress vanished through a small doorway, her hands filled with
what seemed three dozen crumpled brassieres.

In the lingerie department men are at their worst. It doesn't
matter who we are in life, we become yokels here. There are five or six
of us waiting for our women to reappear from the changing-room. We're all
standing against the wall closest to the entry-arch. It's as though
there's a law prohibiting male trespass beyond this point. We're cleaving
to the wall like suspects in a line-up. We're decked out with our women's
parcels and shopping-bags. A couple of the men have been entrusted with
purses, which they're holding in the deliberately awkward, true-grit way
men adopt for such tasks. We're all racing back to oafish boyhood, as
though that regained coarse innocence can mitigate our shame at stumbling
upon this feast of bras and panties, this cornucopia of strings and thongs
and tear-drops and triangles. We shift from foot to foot, staring at the
floor as we do. The cups of weightless bras draw furtive glances from us.
Some white, some rose, some black of course; matte cotton and glistening
silk; frosted, or molten, or sheer. Now and then a clerk will look our
way and whisper something to a fellow-clerk who will then look too, and
both will laugh. Is it just that we're incongruous, we men, as we keep
our clumsy watch? Is the surgeon to my right funnier in the girls' eyes
than the lawyer to my left? And what of myself, a strapping man in middle
age, proprietor of an office full of apprentices and underlings, fascinated
and all but undone by what are only tiny shreds of tenuous fabric?

Julia hasn't yet emerged from the remembered fitting-room when we
pull into the actual railroad station. We're late, but so is Daniella's
train, and we arrive a few minutes before her. The iron horse is crawling
in just as we reach the platform. And there's Daniella, yet another
vision of beauty and ability - and one whose intense attractiveness to me
should assure the reader that what I love above all things in women is
their composure and autonomy, and only then their assertive breasts and
bikini panties.

For Daniella, the eldest of the Bergman girls, is also the
smallest, the most compact, the most boyish-looking. She's a devout
athlete, trim as a vector, and she's not crazy about frills. Her hair is
dark and very short, cut just past boy-length. She's wearing a little
make-up, not much, a blue Oxford-cloth shirt and slim white jeans. Daniella
is a model of minimalism: her breasts are small, but there's just enough
bosom on her to signal her womanhood; her hips are slight, and so are her
buttocks, but, all the same, she consents to curve a little, lest the
observer imagine that she's not delighted with her gender. And her jeans
show clearly that in one area, at least, she's pronouncedly feminine. How
little people understand of the loveliness of the so-called androgynous
look, in which the male element is pubescent at best. It isn't a
disguise, a denial of the great, unbridgeable divide between male and
female. Far from it. It asserts the basicness of the feminine, the
priority of the girlish and the girlishness of the boy. It's a reminder
that, in this sexual realm anyhow, even a little difference goes an
incredibly long way. I gaze - shamelessly, I'm sure, and with swelling
penis - at the succinct hillock in Daniella's milk-white jeans and I
know, however close my stare, that we are worlds apart.

end of part four