a book by Jeff Mach
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I wrote "GIVE" a few years ago; at the time, I was in a longterm relationship without D/s, and the D/s side of me apparently couldn't be repressed entirely. So I began to write down my thoughts, and the book slowly took shape. At the time of this writing, I'm 30 years old and live in Hackensack, New Jersey, right outside of New York City. I own a small web development company, which I started in late 2000. For a long time, I'd put "GIVE" aside, to try to develop my business. But while I like my business, it's not what I really want to do - I've always wanted to be a writer, for as long as I can remember. So with the advent of Spring, I decided to take the plunge and self-publish. I went to Rutgers University, where I had the great good fortune to study with Professor Warren Shapiro of the Anthropology department. It was his influence that made me fascinated with how human beings work, and gave me the tools to try to write about it. In my non-academic life, through a series of improbable events, which included a legal battle, I ended up founding the Rutgers University Rocky Horror Picture Show Club. Being founder of, arguably, the University's most unusual organization, I ended up getting involved in the startup of other groups - the University, at that time, wasn't really set up to deal with things outside the norm, and non-mainstream folks had a bit of an uphill battle. That's how someone who was, at the time, a nice Jewish boy, became one of the founders of the Rutgers Pagan Students Association. It's also why Catty, a member of the Rocky Horror club, approached me when he went to found RUST, the Rutgers BDSM organization. It was during the setup process for RUST that I first learned about D/s - I simply hadn't really known it existed before that. And right around then, I met my first playpartner, Renee. You might call her a bit of a muse. Let me put it this way: she was the first woman i ever struck outside of the dojo... it was with a toy riding crop, in broad daylight, on a crowded college campus, about three minutes after I first met her. Soon after, I started becoming "serious" about D/s, which, for me, meant reading everything I could about it, going to clubs and meetings, and, I'll admit, playing whenever I could. I came to some conclusions, around that time, about what I'd been doing in the past, and what I was starting to learn. I wrote about it in the third section of "GIVE", in a part called "To Take":
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