It's not about tying a woman up. It's about telling her not to move and seeing her obey. There's a scene in the movie Conan, where Falsa Doom, who had been searching for the power of steel, demonstrates his new power. He points to a woman standing on the edge of a pit he is standing in and says, "Come to me, my child." The young woman steps off the edge and falls to her death. "The power of flesh," he says. "That's power."

Perhaps this is an extreme example and certainly I've never asked a submissive to do anything like that, but the fact remains, psychological control runs far deeper than physical control. Sex is 90% mental. When you dominate someone, you are taking their will, or at the very least they are gifting it to you. It is that mental process that fascinates me more than anything, thus I write about it. There are only so many ways you can strike a woman with a whip, but there are millions of ways to bring her to her proverbial knees.

I don't generally believe in physical punishment, unless a submissive needs it because she feels she deserves it. If I reprimand a submissive, it's worse for her than anything I can do physically, for her need is to please me. In fact, virtually all submissive women I've talked to have stated they prefer physical punishment to being lectured to or yelled at. Physical pain heals faster and doesn't cut as deep.

I do practice what's called light bondage, but it's certainly not my main focus. dana finds it enjoyable however and so do I. But it's the mental challenge of bending her will to mine that holds most of my interest.

The Internet is particularly good for psychological domination. It's hard to whip someone over the Internet, but for getting into someone's psyche, it can be very effective. The real problem is, you can never really know if someone is actually doing any of the things she says she's doing or not.

Still, over the years, I have had a number of online slaves, most, over the course of time, have proved to be true to me. Unfortunately it only takes one bad apple (and I found one) to put a person off apples altogether. I believe the expression is once bitten, twice shy.