Cruel Aisha's Perfect Partner

It was maybe inevitable that Aisha and I were drawn together as we were both mature students on our politics degree. Not that mature, as she was twenty-five and I was twenty-nine, but that did make us different to the mainly eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, away from home for the first time, who started the course with us.

Plus we were both Londoners, temporarily relocated to the North of England, and had both worked for quite a while since leaving school. Aisha had been an arts journalist, and was now being sponsored to take this degree. I'd been drifting around different IT jobs, not really knowing quite what I wanted to do with my life.

In other ways we were quite different. Aisha came from a well-to-do British Indian family, whereas I was from a not-rich, not-poor background which seemed to have lived in the same London suburbs for generations, probably as long as there had been London suburbs. But we had a lot of other things in common, not least a similar political outlook, which emerged in seminar discussions.

We were both on the left, and if Aisha was a more radical feminist than me, I was certainly more than sympathetic to her views. So very soon we became close, invariably sitting together in lectures and seminars, and gradually seeing more and more of each other outside class as well.

It wasn't long before we were intimate friends, talking for hours and confiding things to each other that, certainly, I had never discussed with anyone else, including my previous relationships with women I felt as if I had found my soul-mate, someone who genuinely understood me, whilst constantly delighting me with her humour, her passionate convictions, and her iconoclastic way of looking at the world and sharing what she saw with me.

And perhaps it hardly goes without saying that I was powerfully attracted to her. I had been from the beginning, but before long knew I was falling in love with her or, in truth, already fallen.

Although it was also to do with her personality, that attraction was most certainly physical. Aisha was beautiful. Her brown skin glowed, her black hair shone and her eyes sparkled. She had a mischievous grin and, radical feminist though she was undoubtedly was, she didn't dress in dungarees as if it were the 1970s.

Her typical outfit was a shortish black skirt with black tights, and a tight black sweater which accentuated large, firm breasts. Or, when it was warmer, the sweater came off to reveal a tight blouse, the buttons of which sometimes gaped to reveal a normally black bra which, I'm ashamed to say, I could never resist looking at. Of course she didn't always wear the same clothes, but they were always smart, feminine, never slutty but occasionally quite revealing, and she wore plenty of skilfully applied make-up; red lipstick, black mascaraed eyes, painted nails.

The problem was, how could I tell Aisha how I felt? Maybe she already guessed -- it would be hard not to -- but if so she gave no obvious of interest, nor of discouragement. I knew she didn't have a boyfriend, though she had had several in the past, none of whom had been what she was looking for in a someone to settle down with. Something in the tone she had told me that made me half-wonder if she was more interested in women now. But I'd seen no real sign of that, either.

If I told her my feelings and she wasn't interested in me then what would be left of our friendship? Oh, I was sure she'd be very nice about it, and let me down gently, but I also knew something would have changed, and been lost, forever. But if I never told her, I'd never know. And suppose, whilst I was hesitating, someone else got there before me? I'd certainly noticed other men taking a close interest in her, including one of our tutors. I'd also heard her dismiss the 'objectifying male gaze' of such men which was reassuring to me in that it seemed to doom my potential rivals, but profoundly discouraging in another way. What if she regarded an advance from me in the same unfavourable terms?

All this buzzed around in my head like a persistent fly for several weeks until eventually, aided by alcohol, I blurted out how I felt about her and waited to see how she would react.

We were sitting in her bedsit, late at night, as we often did, and, as usual, I was lying on the floor whilst Aisha lay curled on the mattress that served as her bed. It was tantalizing, because we were side by side and yet, clearly, only in a friendly, asexual, way. I can still remember exactly how she looked, with her short, red, sleeveless dress gathered provocatively around her bust, while riding slightly up her bare thighs. Her long black hair swam on the pillow and she'd kicked her shoes off, revealing her petite feet, toe nails varnished to match her dress.

I was very focussed on her at that moment.

At first, her response wasn't entirely discouraging, but it was not very clear, either.

"I, well, I knew or sort of guessed that this conversation was coming," she said, smiling. "And I really admire you for initiating it because I know that can't have been easy. But, well, I'm not sure that I really want to be in a relationship ... it's not you."

Here we go, I thought, the 'letting him down gently' speech has started.

"It's ok," I said, to stave it off, and save us both the embarrassment.

"No, I want to explain to you properly. It's complicated, and you deserve to know, because I never felt as close to anyone else as I do to you and when I say 'it's not you', what I mean is that the kind of relationship I want ... need ... isn't something I think any man could give me."

"You mean ...", I began, thinking she was going to tell me that, as I'd half-wondered, she was gay, or at least moving in that direction.

"No," she interrupted me, guessing what I was going to say. "It's not that. It's that I dream constantly, ever since I was eighteen or so, of a very particular kind of ... way of living. For one thing, I don't want to be kind of owned or defined by a relationship, by patriarchy, if you like. I want to be in control, and I know you understand that and could accept that. But I want more than that, I want a kind of anti-patriarchal relationship, one which actually atones for the wrongs that are done to women."

I couldn't understand what she meant.

"It's really hard to explain. Give me time. I've never, ever dared to say this to anyone." She paused before continuing, and I suddenly realised that she was slightly drunk as well. "You'll probably think I'm mad."

"No," I said. "Tell me. Whatever it is, you can tell me."

"OK, here goes. So, I understand all about male sexuality, it's predatory nature, it's uncontrollable lasciviousness. I experience it every day, in the lechery, the comments, the endless ogling I get from every man from the age of eighteen to eighty! And maybe as a woman of colour I get some extra attention, for being what they politely call 'exotic' by which they really mean 'Asian babe'. I know that even you, for all your support for feminism, are the same. I see the way you leer at my breasts, and at my lacy black bra when it's showing, or at my legs, especially when they are bare. And I think you get an extra kick from the black lace being against my brown skin, or from the brownness of my legs, right? It's ok, you can tell me. Honestly."

I had to admit that it was true, and waited for to continue.

"Well, I understand that is how men are and, do you know, I actually enjoy it in a way. I mean, it is a kind of power when I see men like Mitchell (our tutor) almost dribbling over me. But it makes me really angry at the same time. But I understand it. I've understood it ever since I was a schoolgirl and men, men of all ages, started leering at me in my school uniform. Sometimes, I'd even lead them on, flashing a bit of this and a bit of that, and then watching the look of terror in their eyes when I challenged them about 'looking at me inappropriately'."

Aisha paused for a moment, perhaps remembering some past event.

"Anyway," she continued. "I know, which so many feminists don't seem to understand, that it is never going to change just by men like you becoming 'more enlightened'. So I want to take it and subvert it. I want to tame it, channel it. I want to take the power it gives me over men and use it on my own terms. For you, like all men, that leering is the beginning of something which ends ultimately in you taking control of my body, entering me, owning me. Then, when you have, your desire goes to another target, in an endless predatory quest for more sex, and more."

"You're right, in a way, about men," I conceded, thinking of my own pretty much limitless lust.

"Right. So the first thing about what I want in a relationship is for that to be denied to the man I live with. He never gets to have sex with me. In fact, he never even gets to see me naked!"

"So you're saying you want a sexless relationship?" I asked.

"NO!" Aisha shouted, then continued more quietly. "No, that's not it at all. Oh, I knew no one would understand. It wouldn't be 'sexless'. It would be absolutely saturated with sex! Believe me, you -- he -- whoever it was -- you would be constantly, insanely, completely and hopelessly consumed by sexual desire. You would be aware of every tiny twitch and movement of my body, every atom of my scent. You would beg, literally beg me, to, say, give you a glimpse of my bra strap, or to be allowed to listen at the door when I took a bath, knowing that you were only inches from my naked body."

She glanced at me, as if wondering how I had reacted, before continuing.

"And I, I would know. I would know it all and I would use it. I would quite deliberately taunt you. A flash of cleavage, perhaps. A little side boob visible, or a glimpse of my nipples if I wore a tee-shirt but no bra. Or the sight of my hips as I sashayed round the room. Or maybe just my bra, discarded on the floor for you to find, challenging you to masturbate to it. It would be constantly sexual, constantly discussed but almost never satisfied."

I stared at her, utterly astounded and yet, unquestionably, aroused.

"Almost never satisfied. What does 'almost' mean, Aisha?"

"Yes," she said, eyes gleaming in excitement. "I've thought a lot about this. I think it would be very difficult for you to have no release at all, and actually possibly not safe in terms of health. So what would happen is that sometimes I would give you, you know, hand relief. Not often, maybe every week, and maybe not full orgasm. There is this thing, I don't know if you've heard of it, called a 'ruined orgasm' where you take your hand away at the last moment and he still comes, I mean the spunk comes out in dribbles and twitches, but there's no real pleasure. I've done it to a few men. So you'd get that, and then maybe a full orgasm for a special treat if I felt like it or on, say, our anniversary or your birthday. But it wouldn't be, like, a sexual thing for me. It would be more like a household chore or, maybe, an act of friendly kindness."

"God, you've really thought about this, haven't you?" I asked, still astonished, and even more aroused.

"Mm, yeah," she agreed, her own sexual arousal suddenly obvious in the intent expression on her face. "But there's one thing I can't work out which is how to be sure he doesn't come when I'm not around, you know what I mean, by masturbating. There are these things, they're called chastity cages, that you can use to lock him up, but they are so ugly. And, anyway, really what I'd like is for it to be by trust, and if he did masturbate that he'd confess it along with everything else for chastisement sessions."

I must have looked puzzled.

"Oh, but I haven't explained that bit, have I?" Aisha said. "Let me see. Well, the thing is that, as we've discussed, men are predatory, right? So I know that as well as completely controlling his sexual responses to me, I have to control the way he looks at other women. So at chastisement sessions he will confess in exact detail any sexual thoughts he has had about other women, glimpses of their underwear, glances in the street even, and then I will punish him, according to how serious I think the offence has been."

"Punish him -- how?" I asked, though I was starting to half-guess.

"Um, well, I suppose it would be a kind of spanking but, god, this is embarrassing ...." she tailed off.

"Honestly, Aisha, you've told me so much already, you really don't need to be embarrassed, in fact ..."

"In fact, you are turned on? Yes, I know that, of course. You can masturbate whilst we're talking, if you need to," she said indifferently.

I couldn't resist, and pulled my cock out and began to stroke it. I realised that we had crossed a line of some sort, although I wasn't quite sure what it was other than an explicit acknowledgement of some kind of sexual relationship between us. As for Aisha, she merely glanced over at me with a look of slightly contemptuous amusement before continuing.

"Well, there is this thing, it was used a very traditional implement of punishment in, I think, Scottish schools, called a tawse. It is a kind of two-tailed leather strap. Well, my idea is to use this for the chastisement session. So, let's say, you had looked up a woman's skirt at work, then you get one stroke of the tawse. If you got an erection as well, then that would be two, that sort of thing. So maybe masturbation could be part of that, maybe resulting in six strokes. Or we could use the chastity cage. But, really, I would hope for a man who wanted to be cured of his misogyny and truthfully admitted to his offences against other women and against me. I truly believe that, eventually, the tawse would cure him, or at least reduce his offences. In a way, it would be a kind of nurturing, loving act on my part to help that, but at the same time also a genuine, political act on my part to make him suffer for his part in misogyny. Like I am the strict mother and also the avenging angel. Can you understand that, at all?"

"Yes," I said, and I meant it, in a way. I could see how all this grew, somehow, from many of the ideas that we had often discussed and agreed on. "But ..."

"Yes," Aisha interrupted. "You're right. There is something else, too." Her face reddened slightly, but she looked me straight in the eye and said, "I would derive a specifically sexual satisfaction from being cruel to a man who loved me and who was sexually besotted with me. I would be turned on by the power, and by the pain I was causing him. Not as a strict mother or an avenging angel but as a woman whose feminism was not merely an 'idea' but integral to being a woman. Integral to my sexual expression and identity. To be very blunt, spanking a man would make me wet between the legs. In fact, even talking about it to you now has that effect. And why not? How many men are excited by doing the same to women?"

I gasped at her honesty, and because of the even greater excitement it provoked in me. I had to stop masturbating, for fear I would come.

"But that it still not all," she continued. "Because, although all that I have described would give me sexual pleasure, it would not give me complete sexual satisfaction. For that, I need to have complete sexual intercourse with a man."

"But I thought you said that there wouldn't be any sex in this ideal relationship?"

"Not with him, no. But I would have sex with as many men as I wanted to. My choice who, when and how. I would not be my partner's possession. It's another part of what I mean by reversing the norm. I would not just have sex with other men, but I would taunt my partner with that fact, telling him in detail about all the things other men had done with me that he was forbidden to do. Sometimes I would tell him quite calmly, as if talking with a friend and didn't realise the jealous pain I was causing him. Other times I would tell him with deliberate cruelty, emphasising that I knew how much it hurt him and was enjoying it. I think this would be very, very hard for any man to bear, which is why I know that all this will never be more than a fantasy on my part. It would be particularly hard for him to bear because the only man who would even begin to consider such a relationship would do so because he understood and shared its feminist principles. But, sometimes, I need to be taken by a man who is the opposite of that. To be told by him that my silly little feminist ideas are a joke, and that I need a real man who will treat me like a real women. Slapping my arse. Ripping my knickers off, or instructing me never to wear knickers when we meet. Fucking me roughly. Spurting his cum all over my face and tits. And then I would go home and tell my understanding partner all about it, and how he is not a real man, like my lover. How his cock is far too small to satisfy me."

At this point she glanced down again at my engorged penis, and smiled, raising her eyebrows slightly. It was not difficult to tell what she meant. Then she continued.

"Maybe I will also even introduce the two of them, and urge my lover to humiliate my partner, in front of me, for my amusement. Maybe have my lover come all over my partner's face while I laugh. Maybe making my partner apologise to me in front of my lover for having a small cock. Maybe encouraging my lover to spank my partner in front of me. Maybe making my partner suck my lover's cock. Can you see now, how impossible it is that I can ever have the relationship I want?"

"Yes, but ..." I began.

"No," she stopped me. "Don't say anything until you have heard it all. Heard exactly what your friend Aisha is like, and what it would mean to be with her. You see, I think the man who would accept all this would still have one last male vanity. He would still have the idea that he was at least special in his emotional connection with me, and that the other men just gave me sex. There is a whole, ridiculous, internet pornography about this in which 'hotwives' cuckold their husbands, but always on their husbands' terms, always so long as the woman assures the husband that it is him she truly loves. Have you ever seen that kind of stuff?"

I had to admit that I had.

"Did it excite you -- sexually, I mean? I don't mind -- goodness, I've told you enough about my sexual desires, so you can share yours."

"Yes, well, I suppose some of it does. I mean ...." Now my face reddened.

"Tell me." urged Aisha.

"Well, I find the humiliation aspect of it exciting," I confessed.

"I sort of guessed that, at least since you started masturbating to me. But please understand that such 'cuckolding' is just a more complex version of patriarchy, because the woman still ultimately 'belongs' to her husband or partner. I am totally uninterested in that. I would not allow my partner that ownership of me, ever ..."

I had to interrupt.

"But how would our relationship -- this relationship, I mean -- how would it work with families and friends? I mean, would they know, because ..."

"Yes, I've thought about this, too. I think that with the families it would have to be just be a 'normal' relationship. I'd appear on my man's arm, the beautiful woman, admired and no doubt lusted after. The exception would maybe be my sister, Priyanka, who I'd like to know the truth and who would understand it. Possibly, also, she could oversee chastisement sessions and hand relief if I was busy. She's a couple of years younger than me, but she already understands and shares my needs, as we've talked about them. Yes, thinking about it, it would be useful if she had almost as much control over my partner as me."

I had met Priyanka once. She was a music student, specialising in the violin, I think. If asked to describe her, I would have been as a spoilt little princess. She'd been dressed in a denim mini-skirt and a tight white top crop which strained across her small, firm, bra-less breasts, and had given me the impression, frankly, of being a cruel little cocktease. The thought of her discussing all this kind of stuff with her big sister made my penis swell even more as Aisha continued to explain her vision.

"Beyond that, as well as lovers I would have friends, both male and female, with whom I would share just as much emotionally as I did with my partner, but in addition would confide the nature of my relationship with him. The women I would probably bring to our home and discuss all his humiliations with them, in front of him. I might even let them join in one of the chastisement sessions, to witness, even participate, in that humiliation. It would be quite amusing to see him desperately trying to conceal his feelings of attraction to them, whilst struggling with his humiliation being witnessed. I think I would especially enjoy bringing a very ugly woman to our home, knowing that my partner was so sexually desperate that even an ugly woman would excite him unbearably, whilst giving her the chance to revenge herself for all the patriarchal assumptions about female appearance by inflicting excruciating pain on him -- fifty strokes of the tawse, perhaps. But with my men friends he would only see me walking in the park with, hand in hand, my face smiling as I whispered a confidence, perhaps about him, perhaps about something I had never told him. Later, I would taunt my lover that I thought I was falling in love with someone else. And it might happen. So he would never know whether I was about to leave him for one of these male friends and the possibility would frighten him even more than the possibility that I would leave him for one of my big-cocked, bullying lovers."

As I listened to this long speech I was shocked by it and enthralled by it. I was staggered. Aisha really did seem to have thought out in her mind her perfect, non-patriarchal, even anti-patriarchal, relationship which broke or inverted just about every normal convention I could think of. But there was one thing she didn't seem to have considered. So I asked her -- was there a place for having children in this relationship?

"I've thought about this a lot," Aisha replied. "As things stand, I don't want children and I don't think I ever will. If that changed, then I suppose that either I would have them fathered by one of my lovers, or by surrogacy. If so, I wouldn't expect my partner to stay with me. I would be a whole new situation."

We both stayed silent for what seemed like a long time. Then Aisha said: "So there it is, all of it. And now you can see why I will never find a man with whom I can have the relationship I need!"

I also lay silent. At some point, I think when she had been talking about humiliating her partner in front of an ugly female friend, my cock had spurted thick ropes of cum, some of them splashing up on to Aisha's red dress, although she ignored it. My orgasm had now subsided, and I was able to respond to her unspoken question, and to do so not blinded by lust but with a rational mind, even if it was the rationality of an overwhelming love.

"Aisha," I said. "I think you know that you have found the man you need."

She looked at me, her face somehow both triumphant and concerned.

"Are you sure? Are you sure you want me to be cruel to you? Are you sure you can cope with just how cruel I am going to be?"

"I don't know if I can cope, but I want you to be cruel to me and I want you to enjoy being cruel to me. I even want you to find new ways of being cruel to me that you haven't yet thought of."

"Yes, I'd started to think you might say that," Aisha responded. She lay back on her bed and closed her eyes. She put her hands behind her head, revealing the stubble of her recently-shaved armpits. I caught a whiff of her perfume, and a glimpse of the cup of her red bra. Her dress rose even further up her thighs and although I could not see, I detected another odour, that of her sex, as if she was not wearing panties, or they were saturated with her juices.

She gave her first commands.

"I noticed that your male lechery made you spurt on my dress. You will now lick it off. You will then remove my panties and take them home. You can sniff them and worship them but you may not masturbate. Tomorrow, you will search online and buy a tawse. You will also take the photo of my sister Priyanka in her bikini, which I know you have leched at, from my mantlepiece and you will stand in front of it, naked, for one hour, without touching yourself. After that, you will email her, telling her that you have done that, asking for her forgiveness, and also sending details of the tawse you have purchased and the use it will be put to."

I stared at her, hardly able to take it all in, before she continued.

"You will also email an apology to me for having stained my dress during the time before we were a couple, and a list of all the times and all the reasons - for example, 'glimpse of cleavage', 'view up skirt', or 'nipples visible' - that you have looked at me inappropriately since you first met me, flagging up any of those that have led you to have an erection or to have masturbated. These, as well as your inappropriate glances at Priyanka's breasts and legs when you met her, and at her photograph, will be the subject of your first chastisement session."

"Yes, Aisha," I gasped.

"Yes, Miss Aisha," she snapped. "And stop looking at me. I don't belong to you, you know."