SUBMIT

A British professional career woman details her adventurous personal life as a sexual submissive.

In her provocative memoir, Sonnet, a pseudonymously named businesswoman based in London and New York, celebrates her identity as a sexual submissive. As a child, the author recounts fetishizing the Bible stories that her religious mother read to her at bedtime. Her interest in erotic pain, punishment, and consensual subservience expanded as she grew older. Her memoir, an erotically charged journey of sexual submission, chronicles her unabashed arousal and sexual gratification involving “total, willing surrender,” humiliation, and sexual shame through active, positive submission. Through graphically unconstrained, conversational prose, Sonnet describes episodes of “happy deviance” that had a calming and empowering effect on the rest of her life, which, she admits, isn’t all about sex, kink, and depravity, as media portrayals of BDSM roles tend to depict. Meeting her unassumingly “cherubic” boyfriend Max changed her life as he would escort her down “a rabbit hole of kink” as they got to know each other, fell in love, became longtime BDSM partners, enjoyed polyamorous omnisexual adventures, and made her deviant erotic submission fantasies come to vivid life. Split into three sections, the book addresses the evolution of the author’s mind and how it became a key component to unlocking the pleasure centers of her body and how she perceived her desires. Other sections detail how her body and soul connected to issues of identity, belonging, self-love, consensuality, and community. These revelations are interwoven into explicitly graphic details, making the memoir strikingly candid but not for every taste. The author escorts readers into the boudoirs, dungeons, bathrooms, and play spaces of her exhibitionistic life as a woman dedicated to BDSM servitude, encouraging readers not to make snap judgments about kinky folks and to celebrate, as she does, everyone’s “beautiful weirdness—which is usually not so very weird at all.”

An intense and unapologetically sex-positive self-portrait.