It had been a devastating few days, utterly miserable if I'm being honest, and I had had the feeling that my life was running away from me. The happy certainty, the knowledge that I was my Master's and that I would do anything he required, was slowly being stripped from me. The bond between my Master and me was stretching ever closer to breaking point, and yet I was afraid that he had not realised this. For the first time I was questioning my Master, questioning his motives, his reasoning, his reasons. It is not a good condition for a slave girl, and I was deeply unhappy.

My Master loves me. My Master loves what I do, loves what we do. He is my lodestar, my guide, my impetus, my goal. He knows me and understands me, recognises me for what I am. The truth is, you see, I am not subservient, I am not submissive: nobody is. Not in the way that most people recognise those words. They don't understand, you don't understand, none of you. Unless and until you are in a relationship such as mine you will never understand.

Only we do, and we are enraptured by it.

So let me tell you about me. The slave stripped bare, what it means to be Harriet the Slave Girl.

Firstly, forget any macho preconceptions. I am not in awe of the penis, I do not throw myself at the feet of men out of some sense of destiny, some notion of the master sex. Hardly. I've seen men at their most impressive and at their least impressive. Appendage alone does not maketh the man.

Nor is it a question of recognising the superiority of another person, nor any poorly repressed feeling of inferiority on my part. I choose to be submissive but I am not inferior. Choosing to submit is an act which takes enormous courage, far more than you can believe. Imagine it, from the safety of your living room or wherever you are reading this: imagine, please, what it would be like to give yourself over completely to the caprice of another individual, to forego any right to determine your own actions, to deliberately circumvent your natural instinct. Imagine being forced, let's say, to expose yourself in public, to act contrary to the mores of your society. What are you doing? You are setting yourself outside the norms, pushing the boundaries of acceptability. You are provoking the disapproval of your peers, inviting society to band together in mutual antipathy towards abnormality. All of that, yes. But it is more, much more than that. Society's opinion of you is the passive way of looking at your actions, the view from the outside. It is the view from the inside out which is truly frightening, it is this which makes submission so difficult, and so rewarding.

What you are doing is exposing yourself to the possibility of complete humiliation. You are toying with the prospect of having your safety mechanisms disabled.You're gambling with your reputation, juggling your fragile eggs of decency with increasing fervour, waiting for them to crash to the ground and crack; but waiting, too, for the instruction to increase the risk, to juggle one-handed, or blindfolded, or upside down, or whatever delicious form of mental torture your Master can devise for you. All the time knowing that ruin is just a glance away, and that society's disapprobation, once provoked, is long lived and brutal. Constant fear, constant arousal, your brain fizzing and burning with excitement, exhilaration, the rush of adrenalin, the sheer, mind-expanding and crotch-wetting tension of the moment: that is what terrifies you; and what turns you on.

"Do you submit to my will?"

"Yes, I do."

Think what that means. Put yourself in that position. Consider abandoning free will, relinquishing control. Can you? I doubt it very much. So do not equate submission with inferiority.

No, and this is where most people who have never experienced such a relationship are mistaken, a true dominant and submissive relationship is a partnership, a pair of common minds in search of mutual satisfaction. Each understands the other and each knows what it takes to satisfy the other. They see it as their role to explore the boundaries of acceptability, to probe, to push, to constantly seek to improve the satisfaction of their partner. It is a living relationship, it evolves, it grows. What you think unimaginable today you may happily submit to in six months. And thus you grow as an individual. Far from being a stifling, confining relationship, being submissive is liberating.

But only if it operates in the correct environment.

Only when and where there is trust.

I'm not simply talking about trusting someone not to lock you in handcuffs and then walk away and leave you, or knowing that they will stop if you shout the safe word. Such trust is essential, of course, but I mean something much deeper than that. I'm talking about a bond, a union of two people in mutual and loving search for fulfilment: partners in an exploration of the senses.

Punishment borne of violence, inflicted through malice, is not punishment but abuse. A slap without a kiss, a blow with no caress, such things have no place in the canon of domination. Heartless, soulless, malicious, mendacious, those who inflict pain for no reason other than their own aggrandisement are people to be pitied, not revered.

And so you may understand my confusion and unhappiness over the past few days, when my Master appeared to be riding recklessly over my sensibilities, embarking on a mission far darker and more unpleasant than anything I had envisaged. I had feared I had been cast adrift, left behind by some new turn in my Master's character. By leaving me - so I thought - in the clutches of Sue, a passionless and heartless woman, I felt he was reneging on his duty of care to me. To find out that, far from abandoning me in this cavalier fashion, he was in fact plotting on my behalf sent shivers of high emotion splicing through my body.

I loved my Master. And he loved me. We lay in bed, body to body, and sighed. And plotted our future.

Harriet the Slave Girl and her Master.