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She is a caring
person. She believes in the golden rule,
and tries to do her part in making the world a better place. But she also has a strong capacity for
compartmentalization, and a deep craving to have a man in her life that she can
hurt as intensely as she wishes, without worries about her safety or going to
Hell. She wants to do far more than
merely hurt him, for hurt is usually temporary, disappearing all too soon. She wants to permanently harm him, his mind,
his essence, to feel his despair, to sense the crunch of his defenses as she
takes them one by one.
She has never
taken things this far with anyone, but now is determined to. She can understand why someone might seek
pain if it’s felt as pleasure--anyone who’s enjoyed a hard massage has an
intuitive grasp of that. But real pain,
the kind she is interested in providing, isn’t something a normal person will
undergo unless forced to, and it takes a whole new kind of screwed-up mentality
to deliberately go looking for it.
She’ll never understand people like that, and her usual self would be
inclined to try to rescue them, to somehow fix them and point them in a better
direction. Fortunately for her
compartmentalized dark self, exploitation, not rescue, is the goal, and she
only needs to understand enough to find an appropriate victim.
One thing she
understands is that it’s probably a good idea for her to hunt for someone who
was severely traumatized when young. She
would never traumatize a child, or someone who didn’t ask her for it. And she would never coerce or manipulate a
man into submitting to her. She knows
that, while dishonesty will have a place in their relationship, she must first
be perfectly honest about what she wants from him, including this hard-to-sell
point: that after breaking him down to nothing and leaving him mentally and
emotionally crippled forever, she will very likely find him boring and toss him
away, totally indifferent to what will become of him. It is so tempting to leave that part out, but
she cannot. And then, fully informed, he
must ask for it. This is essential. It is not a moral issue in the slightest, but
rather about the fact that guilt has an annoying tendency to interfere with
enjoyment, so it must be banished. For
it to be banished, there must be that one moment of pure consent, because above
all else he will be consenting to non-consensual treatment: Shortly after that moment, the line between
the two will become blurrier and blurrier, then sharpen again as consent
becomes only a distant memory from his former life. At that point he will hate himself for ever
requesting anything from her, will accurately see it as by far the worst
decision of his life--even the most backwardly wired mind wouldn’t want to go
where he will end up—but it will be far too late for him to get out.
The issue of
consent and guilt is a complicated one, but fortunately she has an internal
flexibility that will enable her to view it at any moment from whatever angle
will best help her take from him and give to herself. She will drill home to him the point that
whatever she does to him he has really done to himself, since he asked for it
that one time. For the same reason, she
won’t let a micro-drop of guilt stick to her, instead pouring it all over him,
making him carry the full weight of it, along with all of her disgust and
revulsion. On the other hand, she also
sees that the consent he gives wasn’t given of his own free will, not
really. When he was violated years ago,
he was a pure, innocent being, deserving of nothing but a good life well-lived,
yet that event instantly fixed his future, drove him to pick up the task of
completing and amplifying what was done to him, while that great innocence
still lives on inside him. When she
harms him, she will be able to use that to heighten her gratification:
destroying one who deserves it might be enjoyable, but doing the same to
someone who has done nothing wrong and offers no resistance is so very, very
wrong—that is to say, very, very sweet--once the possibility of guilt is
removed. And her flexibility permits her
yet another delight. She herself was
traumatized, but in her case fate used that trauma to turn her into someone
with a craving to victimize. As with
him, she had no say in the matter. But
she doesn’t have to keep that belief, and she won’t let him believe it
either. She will train him to believe
that she was always innately superior, that from the starting point he was weak
and gave in to the urge to be a victim, whereas she was stronger and fought it
hard, turning the urge completely around.
And now the rich will get richer and the poor poorer: everything she
takes from him she will add to her own personal emotional resources, making her
happier and healthier even as she pushes him further into misery and
dysfunction. She will make him despise
himself for everything he is, even for being male. And she too will despise him.
She has decided
that, when selecting a victim, she will rely mainly on her instincts, but will
also give him a test: She will stare at
him at length, like a dispassionate predator.
If that makes him terribly uncomfortable but slightly weak and seemingly
not able to leave, he will be the one.
For some time now she has been studying the psychology of breaking
people down. These days it is a popular
subject, and information is not hard to come by. With patience, anything is possible. She will
talk to him many times and at length about various subjects, as civilized
equals do, but she will be studying him, probing for weaknesses. She must proceed cautiously. She’s not sure how well she could handle the
disappointment if she took him down the long path she has planned for him, to a
point just short of the final destination, with anticipation nearly
overwhelming her, but then allowed him to escape by going blissfully
insane.
The first rule of
predation: predators prey, the prey suffers, and when done right only the
predator comes out undamaged. She will
call him by the name Prey, and have him change his name legally to that. People will simply assume it is an unusual,
pleasant-sounding name, and never make the connection, but every time he hears
his name spoken it will reinforce what he is to her. If sheep can learn their names, so can
he. She likes nature documentaries, uses
them almost like porn sometimes, actually, but hates the phrase “predator-prey
interaction,” as if it were about predator and prey “interacting” for a while,
then going their separate ways like nothing had happened. It’s called predation, not recreation. She hates it when the poor terrified,
disoriented wildebeest, with its wild beating heart that will soon be pumping
its life out of a neck wound onto the savannah, gets in a lucky kick and
escapes. Perhaps someday she will try to
find a company that makes DVDs containing only scenes of successful kills, for
people like her to enjoy, or custom-edit some herself. Better yet, have Prey do it. She would have him watch those DVDs every
night without fail, and would even make sure the player is on repeat while he
sleeps, so that he can hear them when his mind is least guarded. It will hasten
his acceptance of his role, and fill him with a sense of inevitability and
futility. Permitting oneself to be hurt
is disgusting.
Prey can insist
on a few small conditions up front, but that’s all right; there are many paths
to his destruction. She will smile and
agree, pleasantly enough, keeping to herself, for the time being, her certainty
that he is a reckless fool; he is freely offering himself up, along with clears
words of understanding as to what they are negotiating, but without having a
full, personal comprehension of all that truly implies. There will be plenty of time to mock him for
that later. Mocking him outright,
tossing out the etiquette book and going far beyond using the wrong fork or
forgetting to say thank you, while he just sits there and takes it, will be so
freeing, like telling off the boss but 100 times better. This will be about self-improvement, in a
way. Maybe she should write a book: “Mocking
Your Way to a Better Life.”
She will use
physical pain as a tool as necessary to get what she wants from Prey, but only
sparingly, because physical pain draws the victim’s focus to the part that
hurts, rather than to the pain she wants to plant and nurture throughout his
soul. She does have a recurrent,
unspeakable fantasy about physical harm: starving his brain of just the right
amount of oxygen, killing just enough brain cells so that he can tell that he
has lost a fair chunk of intelligence.
His anticipatory fear would be something to behold, and later she would
be able to taunt him about his new, stupid self. Plus, she could use the threat of further
such “treatments” to ensure his compliance.
But the fantasy tends to lose much of its power as she considers the
practical details, the unknown risks.
Choking, she knows, would be too dangerous. Perhaps having him breathe air with little
oxygen content. But what
concentration? For how long? She would be highly unlikely to find surefire
instructions for how to accomplish the treatment, and the very last thing she
wants him to be able to do is to escape his future through vegetablization or
death. The thought of his escaping his
fate through her error or any other means infuriates her.
She is enraptured
at the thought of causing so much pain, pain that serves no other purpose than
to make her feel good. The pointlessness
is somehow essential for her. She could
never take much pleasure from torturing someone for information, for example,
as that would have a practical purpose.
She will rarely raise her voice, since she knows that would merely
stiffen his defenses; she wants him to relax enough for her to get inside him,
close to his essential core, where the real potential to produce agony
lies.
She is sometimes
nice to him, perhaps even most of the time.
She is, after all, a truly nice person.
She finds that she actually likes him, and doesn’t try to hide that. He is starved for love and affection, as he
has always been. Although he is
endearing and has been loved by many, he has been unable to feel that love his
entire life, in even minute doses. He
sometimes has to turn away when he sees what others have and he cannot. In his starvation he is reflexively drawn to
any hint of affection, but thoughts of love and abuse are all tangled up inside
him, and he feels certain he isn’t worthy of real love anyway. He truly deserves a woman patient and tender
enough to try to help him heal. But she
for damn sure isn’t that woman, and she will make damned certain that he never
gets near that woman. Instead she will
mix abuse with, when needed, slight hints of the possibility of affection, a
touch, a small smile, a soft word, to induce him to take one further step
toward self-destruction and complete self-hatred, and away from any chance of
the love every human needs to feel alive inside. It is a horrible, horrible thing to do to a
person, a form of slow, semi-consensual murder of the psyche, in a way, but she
wants it so much her breath catches in her throat whenever she thinks of it,
and she has to quickly turn her mind to something else in order to
function. It is a tool she can use
against him again and again, a joke he will fall for it every time, each time
ending up one layer deeper in humiliation and despair. But she will never lie about what she wants
him for, even during periods of apparent normalcy, because a victory gained by
that degree of cheating would be less than everything. And she does want everything from Prey.
She especially
enjoys playing with his mind, turning him into a person he never in any way
wanted to be. For example, when she
first met him and they were having their long, “civilized people” talks, she
learned that he was an ultra-rationalist, accepting only beliefs supportable by
fact. No silly superstitions,
pseudo-science, or supernatural beliefs for him, thank you! So she decided to make him a believer in
astrology. Getting him to learn the
basics was easy: she simply gave him appropriate materials and told him to
study them. But then, using his
principles against him, she said they should objectively test the horoscopes,
to see if they have any value. At the
end of each day, she would have him read the newspaper horoscope aloud, then
say whether, in his opinion, it had made an accurate prediction for that
day. At first he would talk about their
ambiguity and vagueness, but she would quickly interrupt: and say that all she
wanted from him was a yes or no, and an explanation for his answer, justified
by facts. Her response was always the
same: if he said the prediction was accurate and gave a remotely plausible
explanation, she did nothing. Otherwise,
she gave him a short, intense punishment.
(This was one situation where she liked to use physical pain. It wasn’t done for her enjoyment, but because
it was a fast, effective way to correct behavior.) He quickly learned what answers she wanted,
and tried his best to give those that she would accept. Since she had so much control over his life,
she often “helped” him in the early stages by altering the course of his day to
match the horoscope. She didn’t bother
to be subtle about it, and he could easily see what she was up to, but he was
grateful, because she was making it easier for him to avoid being struck. And it gave him the slightest hope that maybe
she cared about him. But it didn’t
change his actual opinion about astrology.
Except that it
did, without his noticing. It was hard
mental work for him, trying to think up correlations between daily events and
horoscope that seemed plausible enough to keep her hand off the cane. The work became easier when he started to
actually believe there might be some connection. Eventually he bought into it so thoroughly
that she could show him completely contradictory horoscopes from two different
papers, and he saw them both as amazingly predictive. It got to the point where he wanted to check
the horoscope first thing in the morning, anxious to see how things would
go. She even found that she could wound
and disorient him by withholding it from him.
She thought that was great, because the more he felt his life was in
control of forces outside himself, the easier it was to break him down. And, of course, she was later able to harvest
what she’d sown, shoving in his face his earlier statements about people who
read horoscopes, pointing out how weak his mind was for buying into astrology
so quickly, how unstable he was becoming, how pointless it would be for him to
resist her in anything. That crushed
him, of course. But he was still anxious
to see that horoscope as early in the day as possible, to see whether his day
would be absolute misery or just really, really bad.
Another thing she
decided to do was to get him to believe in the efficacy of crystals. He didn’t know anything about crystals, and,
frankly, neither did she, nor did she care to.
But she did have a couple of small translucent stones she had bought on
vacation in the Rockies some time ago.
She had them turned into pendants, to be hung from their necks (her
chain of higher quality, of course). She
said that her crystal was of a positive “giver” variety, and his was a negative
“taker” kind. She added to his list of
rules that he was never to remove his.
(The list was lengthy, and many of the rules contradicted each
other. She loved that part, because it
meant that she could justify—when she felt like justifying—punishing him at any
time. It was a good way to teach
powerlessness: her arbitrary interpretation of a rule was always right, and as
for his interpretation, well, as the inferior, he didn’t get one.) She often told him that every time she did
something to break him down, a little bit of his “life force,” “power,”
“energy,” “self-esteem,” “dignity,” “humanity,” “soul,”—or whatever other word
occurred to her in the moment to use—would leave him permanently, would flow to
his neck crystal, then to her crystal, and then be forever absorbed into her
being. (She didn’t, in fact, much like
her rock, and so didn’t wear it very much.
But she told him that his crystal had some kind of storage capacity, and
would transmit the next time she wore it.
Silly, silly words that he, as always, listened to very intently, since
he never knew when there would be a “test.”)
This has worked
very well for her. His stone is not only
a constant physical reminder of his inferiority, but has become a constant,
oppressive presence on his chest, a point of departure through which he can
somehow actually feel everything valuable about him, that which he desperately
needs and wants, leave him forever, bit by it. She can make him feel like
nothing just by glancing at his chest and giving the hint of a smirk, as if
appalled that anyone would think so little of himself as to keep on wearing
such a thing. Sometimes, when she puts
him into the most intense misery and fear, she notices his hands quickly start
to reach toward his chest, as if to rip the stone off and stop the loss, but
then, just as quickly, stops himself. It
is such a small thing, barely noticeable.
She wonders whether he knows he does it, whether he knows she notices,
whether he has any idea of what that does for her.
As she continues
her work, grinding him down, coldly and slowly stripping away his emotional
defenses, at some point he becomes incapable of resistance, of escape. He knew intellectually that this path was
going to lead to his complete vulnerability.
Neither of them pretended otherwise, and he was the one to ask for it in
the first place. Yet somehow, in his
mind, turning back would always be an option, no matter how far things
progressed. That protective delusion
still lies somewhere in his head. This
is the point of highest reward for her, because she can sit him down and slowly
(he’s not going anywhere) and sincerely—gently, even, although the days of
guiding him forward with glimpses of affection are forever over--explain to him
what she has done to him, what he can’t let his mind fully accept on its own:
that he’s now trapped in a world of pain, utterly helpless until death, and
there’s no way for anyone to unbreak him, even if she were to permit the
attempt. She brazen taunts him and
dares him to leave, and he cannot. She
tells him to kneel before her, tells him he cannot turn his head or flinch, but
that he is welcome to try. She slaps him
hard, many startling times, each time stabbing him verbally with ragged cuts to
his self-esteem, but he is unable to move.
Watching his face in the moment he comprehends what he has become,
becomes aware that his options have completely vanished, fills her with
ecstasy.
She no longer has
to bother with thinking about how to manipulate him and break him down. He is a fly without wings or legs. Her only worry, a silly little one, is that
someone else like her might find him and exploit all of the work she’s put
in. But that concern doesn’t long
persist, because his will is now hers (except when she instructs him to choose
between inconceivable pain A and unimaginable pain B), he does what he is told,
and she would never let him get into a situation where there is a danger of his
being used by someone else. She can
completely relax around him and focus on maximizing his agony. She is completely open and honest with
him. There is no reason for her to be
anything else any more, because he simply does not matter. They have an incredibly intimacy—so dark that
the universe should not permit it, and she feels no warmth for him at all, is
repelled to the point of giddy sickness sometimes by what he is—but it is
nevertheless the most intense intimacy she has ever felt. Still, Prey is only a small, though intensely
satisfying, part of her life. He is not
even a person anymore, really, not in any sense that really matters. She has carved away everything from his
being, except for what suits her. His
only reason for existence from now on will be as a thing for her to milk for
pain at her whim.
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