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.