“We all need someone to be disappointed us”, Richard Millner told me, and he’s decided that someone, in his instance, should be me: I must function as the policeman in his head.  That seems to be part of my role as a domme; to find my playmates’ untrammelled behaviour unacceptable. In fact I find very few things unacceptable, but I’m an obliging sort and am fully prepared to pretend I do, if that’s what they need. Baby Loulou said something similar. He tries to read and go for walks on his days off, rather than watching TV and playing on his phone, as he’s decided this will constitute goodness in my eyes, although I’ve expressed no moral judgement on any of these activities. We’re all just grinding through the hours between birth and death. Do what you want. No one cares, particularly not me.   My childhood moral training was pretty simplistic - get what you want, by any means, just don’t get caught - and nothing I’ve learnt in adulthood has steered me from that philosophy.

But everybody believes in something. If that something doesn’t require you to improve yourself, you will set your heart after something even more meaningless - the next level on a computer game, money, more likes - we are all junkies: even the zen masters can’t get enough zen. There’s a good reason AA insist we replace our yen for booze with a commitment to a higher power. A different devotion, less prone to innard pickling, although vastly less socially acceptable. Addictions all have their downsides. Trick is choosing sensibly, ameliorating their worst side-effects - oh, and not choosing one that wrecks your looks.

So it’s not me these boys want to be good for, but themselves, and I am merely the conduit, the intermediary superego, whose rules they convince themselves they must obey. I am functioning as an old Testament God in their lives, liable to smite them if they don’t do as I prefer - although interestingly they don’t trouble to find out what I would prefer. My views aren’t actually what count here; they could as well invoke a yoghurt or teapot that needs obeying.   Similarly, I often get clients write to tell me I can “do as I want” with them, although I doubt this would include me taking their money and pissing off to the pub. “Invent some new sadistic torture just for me within the confines of my particular preferences and limits” is what they really mean, which doesn’t sound quite so selfless.

But to return to baby Loulou and Richard, both have managed to convince themselves I would prefer them to improve their bodies and minds, and will be disappointed in them if they don’t. Rather than God, I guess, I’m more like their mother. Wanting boys to be the best boys they can be is the kind of ambition a proper mother would cherish. They want me to be proud of them. Well, nothing wrong with that, I guess. Fatherless from birth, I will keep marrying men 20 years older than me, then striving to please them, so I totally get it. It’s a brave and interesting kink to admit and I’m happy to help, so long as I don’t have to do anything beyond be a sort of moral pin-up on whom they can project their own particular ethical preferences.  

And if they were to ask what I believe constitutes a life well lived, I would quote the Stoics and tell them we all have a duty to fulfil our own potential, the way an acorn is destined to become an oak, should nothing thwart it. Do that. I don’t know if it’s good, but now God is dead it seems sensible as anything else. I was destined to be read and will keep striving to be read, and the more I understand how difficult that ambition will be to achieve, the more determined I become to make it happen. Go ahead boys. Make me proud.

You can pre-order my first book, My Body is My Business, here:
  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1914498135/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_10WKSRAVXH427PRXYKC8