Oh, To Be Captured by Pirates! Finding My Submissive Self by Stella Della Sera

How old was I when I discovered my submissive self?

I think I was born this way. I realized very young that I was excited by things that my friends either thought were icky and scary or they just didn't get at all. I always wanted to play games where someone could end up getting captured and imprisoned and "tortured," and I always tried to make sure that poor tormented captive was ME. Nobody got why I always wanted to "lose." I didn't get it either, I thought it just meant I was a loser.

And then there was the famous Pirate Movie. I have a vivid memory of watching some old black-and-white pirate movie when I was maybe seven or eight or nine years old. I don't know the name of it, I wish I did, I think it was some sort of breakthrough experience for me. The pirates had captured a beautiful aristocratic young woman and locked her in chains and she was going to be either held for ransom or else sold into slavery by the devilishly handsome pirate captain, and in the meantime she was his captive and completely at his mercy and she was bravely facing The Fate Worse Than Death: Sex! And I was absolutely riveted: OH MY GOD SHE IS SO LUCKY I WANT TO BE HER! I said to myself. PLEASE GOD LET ME GROW UP TO BE HER THAT'S ME IN THOSE CHAINS PLEASE!

There was another female captive too, an older woman who was I think the starchy old governess or servant or companion to the beautiful young princess or countess or heiress, or whatever she was. But the pirates didn't keep her, they actually set her free! They released her and sent her home with their ransom demand, and I thought the difference between the two was incredibly important. I have a whole theory of what this logic meant to my little girlish mind. (Got a minute?)

Of course the beautiful countess (or whatever) was the most valuable captive, so she was the obvious one to hold for ransom or sell as a slave, and the screechy old crone was the one to send home. But as a little girl it didn't seem unfair to me that you were worth more if you were the young, rich, beautiful, suffering heroine, that just seemed obvious. And here's the logic that made such a huge impression on me:

To desire you so much that your captor must take away your freedom, to eliminate the pain of not having you, to eliminate the risk of your rejecting him or refusing or leaving or changing your mind or simply not wanting what he wants, so that he has to make you his slave in order to possess you completely because his desire for you is so great — what could be better, what could possibly make you feel more valuable and desirable and sexually powerful than to be wanted so much you have to be held captive and enslaved, so that you become more powerful as a female even as all your worldly power is taken away? How could any female possibly not secretly want to feel that way, I wondered at eight or nine. (I still wonder that.) How could you possibly want to be someone who's not even considered worth enslaving? Wouldn't being set free be almost the same thing as being thrown away? Who would want to be so worthless that you could be thrown away? To be desired so little that even pirates wouldn't want to own you?!

How awful, I thought, with my perfect little girl logic. So being free could be just as terrible as being a slave. And of course, I thought, it must be so awful to be enslaved and used and sold and tortured and passed around the crew like a piece of meat, blah blah blah, but when you actually end up chained to the bed in the handsome captain's stateroom and the door closes and you have absolutely no choice but to experience whatever he wants to do to you, I suspected it might not really be so awful after all. It might be a little like one of those captive games I loved to "lose." And no matter what, it's not your fault, is it, you don't have any choice but to enjoy it, you're a slave now!

I may have been feeling unusually unloved and abandoned and susceptible to this logic at the time I saw the infamous Pirate Movie, but I think every female has felt much the same thing at one time or another, that if only someone really wanted me enough to make me theirs/his/hers, even if they had to overrule my objections, then at least I would feel valuable and worth something. Maybe I caught just the right old pirate movie at just the right age? Perhaps the logic of enslavement and desire fit perfectly into my brain at the perfect time because I was already wired to be ready to believe that? I don't know.

I wanted the beautiful countess (me!) in that pirate movie never to escape or be rescued (although of course I wanted my handsome fiancé to try desperately to rescue me), I wanted her/my suffering and torment to go on forever, I wanted her/me to hang eternally in that delicious uncertainty between the hope of rescue and the fear of unrelenting slavery and torment (and the unmistakable implication of sexual submission and torture and gang rape, though I'm sure the movie probably only implied those things), I wanted that awful moment to never end but I also wanted to experience all the other awful moments that would follow that moment, and I wanted to be thrown down into that pirate ship's slave hold and never emerge again.

I remember watching this thing with my older sister, and she was so disgusted with the movie and so disgusted with me for being so fascinated by it, and I couldn't understand why she didn't think this was just the coolest, scariest, most amazing thing we'd ever seen. I was overwhelmingly excited and frightened at the same time, and frightened of being so excited by something so "wrong."

I started masturbating really young too, I can't even remember when I started, I'm certain it was before I was even in school. My masturbation fantasies became more and more obsessed with slavery and captivity and pain and torture and sexual humiliation, and of course pirates and slaves and slave traders and cruel handsome pirate captains and their beautiful captives and what those sexy pirates would do to them, even before I had a very clear idea of what sex was and how it worked. I became obsessed with this very easily, but I didn't accept it easily, it took me years to be able to accept all this about myself.