.

|||||||||| 6:41 ||||||||||

She couldn't believe she'd let him talk her into this, but she knew it was time for her to take his directions for a change, instead of issuing them. That way---her way---hadn't worked at all. It had turned her into something she despised.

It was twilight, this church had had its last service for the day at two in the afternoon, but the parking lot was half full. This was the place all right. They found a parking space, and as they walked across the church's parking lot he held her hand.

“I'm here for you, Babe!”

She fought back tears, “And I can't understand why. I don't deserve you!”

“Sure you do.”

“But after everything I did to you...”

“You have a problem, that's all.”

“Which I took out on you!”

“I know. But everybody has some sort of problem. None of us is perfect. And you did ask for help. Don't they say that's the first step?”

“I don't know,” she crowed miserably. “I've never been to one of these. I always thought these kinds of groups were pathetic. For the weak...”

A series of hand-drawn cardboard sign directed them around the church and down a flight of steps. The meeting was being held in the basement.

“Facing something like this isn't weak. Weak would be giving up. Running.”

“Running sounds like a great idea right now. I don't think I would have made it all the way here without you.”

“But I am here. I care about you. And in a way I'm partly to blame.”

“Don't say that! You're not to blame! It was me! I did all those things!”

Her tears were pouring freely now. What a great way to make an entrance to a room full of strangers, crying like some whimpering basket case. It was humiliating. But then maybe she deserved to be humiliated...

She tried to pull her hand away from his; this man's love and forgiveness made her feel even more horrible about herself, but he held on.

“I let your games get too far,” he said as they reached to bottom step, “And I was sort of caught up in them too. I thought submitting to them would make you happy.”

“Happy? No, they made me...” she trailed off. She wasn't sure what her turning him into her feminized plaything had made her.
.

|||||||||| 6:45 ||||||||||

As they entered the church basement she was surprised by two things: How crowded the large windowless room was, and how normal all these women looked. These weren't monsters. And a lot of them seemed happy. Laughing, talking, seemingly at peace with themselves. The thought popped into her head that maybe they had wandered into the wrong meeting. Some meeting for normal people, alcoholics or junkies or compulsive furries. Not twisted freaks like her...

The clock on the wall said a quarter til seven. The meeting itself wouldn't begin for a while. She wished it wasn't so well lit, every damn florescent light in this basement buzzing, the sound of them seeming to come from inside her head. She felt way too visible here.

Most of the other women stood around talking. A few were here with their boyfriends or husbands. Others had huddled into little groups of friends, yacking away. But there were a few who had sat down already, in the last two rows of the grid of seventy or so folding chairs. Alone, afraid, deliberately spaced as far from each other as they could, and looking as miserable a she felt.

She pointed and they sat down among these newcomers. He took her hand again, but where she had been gripping his tight on their walk from the car she just let hers lie in his, like some dying thing with no fight left in it...
.

|||||||||| 6:48 ||||||||||

There was a tall muscular man who didn't seem to be a significant other of any of the women here but an actual member of the group. He was sharing a “war story” with a circle of woman about some act of insanity that his obsession had convinced him was a good thing to do. They were laughing, and didn't seem fazed by his black leather S&M apparel, the vest and studded wrist straps and a Nazi-looking uniform-fetish hat in glossy black leather. But with his easy smile and friendly eyes, and the way the others were treating him, even he seemed more normal than she felt. He had come here with his boyfriend or maybe husband, a mousy looking guy with wire rimmed glasses, dressed in topsiders, chinos and a Polo shirt.

In her mind she named the smaller man Lance. She did that with people, she didn't know why, but she sometimes accidentally called them by her made up name long after she'd learned their real one. They were Lance and Bruno. She wouldn't have known they were together if she hadn't spotted them sharing a brief, decorous kiss a minute earlier, before they each went off to mingle.

Lance seemed well at ease in this gathering too; and she guessed his preppy outfit was his way of asserting himself, presenting as the person he felt he was inside. But his plucked and shaped eyebrows---which like her own boyfriend's would stay in this clearly feminine style for several months to come---hinted at why this couple was here.

A woman stepping through the basement's door called out to him, “Hey Sissy Bill!”, and they hugged and air-kissed.

So it was Bill, not Lance. And the “sissy” was an ironic nickname. Not who he was now but what he had been. And while she guessed it hadn't been of his choice, and had been a living hell for him, he could joke about it. And amazingly it seemed like he had forgiven his feminizer “Bruno”, and had found their relationship was one worth having another go at, this time without his being merely an object of Bruno's manipulations.

If only her own relationship could be saved and put onto a new course the way theirs had. For the first time since childhood she actually prayed. That it would be. That it wasn't too late.

But then maybe “Sissy Bill” was basically just weak. A little kiss-ass people pleaser. The weak and needy will forgive any abuse, the way a dog will. The man she'd tried to turn into her submissive girly plaything was neither. And while he'd promised to help her get the help she needed he hadn't promised to stay with her. And she'd been afraid to bring that up.

The only thing she hated more than feeling weak was being afraid. But she was. Afraid of all these feelings that has come bursting up from where she'd buried them, tossing her around like a rag doll caught in a tornado. The absolute loss of control of these past few days since all of her drive and certainty collapsed; toppled by that one question: Why the hell am I doing this?!

She was sick, that was why. And she was afraid that maybe she was too far gone for the healing these people were experiencing. That she was beyond any sort of redemption.
.

|||||||||| 6:51 ||||||||||

Her boyfriend got up and went to the restroom. A young woman came up to her. She'd looked like a college kid at first, perky and cute, but the crow's feet around her eyes said at least 35.

“Hi, I'm Candice! Is this your first meeting?”

She nodded, her face burning. She couldn't speak.

Candice laid a hand on her shoulder. “You've taken the first step. You're here. And we're glad you are. We all felt like you're feeling, at first. The guilt, wondering if we're crazy, or maybe just plain evil. But it really can get better! It works... if you work it!!”

She nodded, faking a smile and Candice went over to another newcomer.

“So where you from? Oh really?! I spent a couple of summers in-”

So at least it wasn't a canned pitch that Candice had given her. The same few lines to everyone, like some vacuous cocktail party hostess making the rounds...
.

|||||||||| 6:53 ||||||||||

On his way back from the bathroom her boyfriend was chatting with everyone. Saying Hi to some of the women but mostly with the half dozen boyfriends and husbands that were here. He had always been better at this sort of thing than she was.

He talked the longest with Sissy Bill. They were looking over at her, then at the S+M guy, then back at her. She cringed, wondering what he was telling the guy about her. Well whatever it was, she no doubt deserved it...
.

|||||||||| 7:00 ||||||||||

At seven on the dot everyone took their seats. The meeting was officiated by an older woman who called herself Vicki Nertz. She'd noticed the woman earlier, you couldn't help but notice her. Tall, and far more elegantly dressed and than most of the ladies here.

It was only when she started speaking in a raspy and somewhat masculine voice that she realized Vicki was most likely a transsexual. Which was neither here nor there, but she wondered what the woman's story was and if she'd been forcibly feminized herself.

Vicki read the minutes of the last meeting, announced tryouts for an FFA softball team, and had somebody read a section from the Big Book (which was the same book they used in AA and a score of other 12 step programs) called 'The Promises':

“...a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear... Self-seeking will slip away... Our whole attitude and outlook will change. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves...”

She wasn't sure about this “God” stuff, but these people sure had something she didn't. Serenity? Peace? But then maybe they had never been as messed up as she was now...

But when Vicki brought on the meetings guest speaker (“All the way from San Diego, California, Miss Candice H!”) and the not-so-young young woman who had greeted her earlier started telling her story, she realized that if anything, some of these people had gotten themselves far more messed up than her.
.

|||||||||| 7:05 ||||||||||

“Hi, I'm Candice, I'm a forced feminizer,” Candice said.

“HI, CANDICE!” bleated the whole room in response.

After this Candice didn't say anything for awhile. She smiled, the crowd smiled back. Finally she turned and pointed at a placard on the wall, which listing the 'Twelve steps'. When everyone was looking at it she said, “Admitting you're powerless... Now that's a tough one for people like us.”

Everyone who wasn't sitting in these last two rows laughed.

“We NEVER want to feel powerless!” exclaimed Candice, “Our whole disease is all about power. Having it, hoarding it, lording it over someone, it's the last thing we want to give up. But when the quest for power takes over your whole life, and turns you into a whole different person, well that's the thing we're powerless against. Kind of ironic, huh? When we're in the game, we're so busy controlling others we can't even see that something is controlling us. Except when every once in a while, right in the middle of thinking we have what we always wanted---this godlike sense of power over the life of another, or in my case many others---the thought will pop up 'This isn't right. This isn't who I am...' And it's so far from the image we have of ourselves, it almost sounds like another person. Some uninvited party crasher in our head. So what do we do when doubt starts to gnaw at us?”

“MORE POWER, SCOTTY!” shouted a half dozen people. Apparently it was a catch phrase of theirs.

“Exactly! We crank the game up another notch. The cruelty, the demands, shifting the rules around. Squashing that little voice in our head, like slapping a mosquito. It lets us feel in control again. For a while. But it's a self-perpetuating cycle, and it leads to bad, bad places. For the people we hurt, but for us too. In the end---if it progresses that far---it destroys them, us, everything in our lives and for miles around. I know. Let me tell you about the lowest point in my life...”

She had to admit Candice was good at this. She was charming, and really believed in what she was selling.

She listened raptly a Candice told how she'd feminized and brainwashed her boyfriend when she was a psychology student at San Diego State University. Candice had done everything she had done, but far more systematically. She was disturbed by how enthralled and envious and even sort of turned-on she was by Candice's tale. It made her wish that they hadn't come here tonight but were back in their apartment, the game still in play; maybe with her putting a corset on her boyfriend, tightening it up, grinning as he winced and gasped. Listening to something that fueled her fantasies like this could hardly be useful in helping her change her ways, could it?

Then one day Candice was shopping at the mall with her “girl” when a classy, well-spoken woman who she took to be the owner of one of the mall's shops approached her. Despite the nearly flawless transformation she'd given the former male, the woman had recognized what her slave was. And more disturbingly, what she was. The woman said she admired what Candice had been able to do all by herself, with limited resources and no formal training.

“How would you like to be able to do what you've done here on a much larger scale? And make money doing it. Lots of money! We can train you in this artform, show you how to do this much, much more efficiently And the clay that artists such as ourselves require---and we're talking the very prettiest young men---will be requisitioned for you by others, delivered to you right in our little factory. You'd have of state of the art equipment at your disposal, not to mention several rather accomplished if somewhat dissolute surgeons...”

The woman's talk of “Will to Power” and how it was nature's way for the strong to dominate and control the weak was intoxicating. The flattery, the promise of riches, and the chance to work alongside like-minded people---people not fettered by conventional notions of morality---was a combination Candice couldn't resist. She quit college, disappeared from her old life and dove into this new one. The last twinge of conscience she had felt was over dropping her former boyfriend into the pool of abductees for further feminization, and seeing her and the rest of these broken, confused new girls being marched onto a ship, to be sold to buyers overseas. And after that she felt very little that wasn't centered around power and cruelty and exploitation.
.

|||||||||| 7:22 ||||||||||

The speaker's story was no longer so enthralling. It had spiraled into something sickening. And now she was thinking she didn't belong in this meeting for reasons opposite to those reasons she'd had earlier.

Whatever she had done, it was nothing compared to those things Candice was talking about. She was up there talking about SLAVERY for God's sake- stripping someone of every last thing that made them human and selling them like so much merchandise, to men who would do God only knows what to them. Weird surgeries, snuff films; they were property now, to be used any way their owners desired. How could Candice stand up there smiling, talking about “gratitude” and “getting her life back together” after all the lives she'd helped obliterate?

She was nothing like this Candice. Compared to Candice's crimes all she had done to her man was played dress up with him. It was dawning on her that she had nothing in common with this bunch, and that the last thing she needed was to start hanging around with them. Or ask them for advice about how to live.

She was ready to leave right then, but her boyfriend shook his head. And she had promised him she would stay through this one meeting, so she stayed in her seat.
.

|||||||||| 7:30 ||||||||||

It wasn't a prepared speech, so the chronology of Candice's story kind of rambled. She talked about growing up, a bright accomplished student; and reminisced about her love of sports and the rush she got from trouncing her opponents, the pride she took at her growing collection of cheap little trophies; but also about the frustration of constantly butting heads with parents and coaches and teachers, who in their thickheaded hidebound mentality just refused to comprehend it when she pointed out that their was a better answer to the test question than the supposedly correct one; or how things could go so much more smoothly if they did things in a far more sensible way. Her way.

God, how she related to this part of Candice's story. They weren't so different after all. And Candice's dream of a world where she would be the one in charge; where everything wouldn't be gummed up and complicated by the obstinacy of others was a dream she remembered well.

She also identified with Candice's problems with romance. How boys would talk down to her, lecturing and explaining things that she understood better than they did; and her frustration with their assumption that they would make the important decisions. Until Candice had tried her hand at lesbianism, hoping that would be less aggravating. And while girly girls were beautiful, appealing in so many ways, in attempting to connect with them there had been something that just didn't feel right, that failed to fulfill her. The perfect match for Candice had seemed to be someone who didn't exist, a female with an underlying core of male traits that would be there but wouldn't assert themselves.

Sitting there in the back row of that church basement it was bizarre how much she related to Candice's teen years. She hadn't actually tried sleeping with girls, she had sensed that wouldn't work, but she had the same dream of finding someone sort of androgynous, and a bit submissive, that she could mold into the perfect "girlfriend". And somehow she even knew what Candice was going to say next. How she had discovered forced fem fiction, where the world that she'd thought had only existed in her own dreams was perfectly described...

And as Candice's tale jumped ahead again, to her year of running with the kidnapping/feminizing /slavery ring; and how it all blew up, and Candice had wound up arrested; she thought, yes, that really could be me; maybe not now, but in the future... It was a thought that chilled her to her very core.

And now she remembered this story from the news several years back. She'd had a different name, but the pretty girl with stunned expression was definitely Candice, trying to hide her face as she was lead away in handcuffs. A monster, reviled by every right thinking person. Even the girl's own mother told reporters she had thought her daughter was dead and now she wished she'd stayed dead...

“And you know what's really sick? After everything we did-” Candice started to say and then corrected herself, “Everything I did, I was able to cry plenty of tears for poor, poor pitiful me; but the only thing I felt guilty about was testifying against the woman who ran the operation; that deal they gave me so I could get my sentence reduced. Never mind all those young guys we programmed and sold into slavery. I mean seriously- How fucked up is that??!

“It was only later, well into my five years at Silver Strand Federal Prison that I started to really see what I was. And that was mostly thanks to talks I had with my visitor---my only visitor in all that time---who weirdly enough was the FBI agent who busted us. This woman had devoted herself to stopping people like me, but she saw something in me that made her think I could be saved...”

Candice was crying by the end of her pitch, and so was she. But Candice was smiling through her tears, which were now tears of gratitude: “That agent---my enemy---threw me a lifeline, and took me to my first few FFA meeting there in the Strand. Wherever you are, Agent Allie Burns, thank you!”

Even some of the girls in the back row were applauding as Candice left the podium. Maybe she should have too, but she still wasn't ready to do anything that might increase her visibility.
.

|||||||||| 7:40 ||||||||||

There was a break, in which half the room made a beeline for the fresh air of the outside where, from the smell wafting in through the door, they were all smoking like chimneys.

Her boyfriend turned to her, “So what do you think?”

“I don't know.... That Candice, ugh!” she shuddered, “She did a lot much worse things than I ever did!”

“Maybe she did them so you don't have to...”
.

|||||||||| 7:50 ||||||||||

Vicki Nerts returned to the podium, and announced that the meeting was now open for sharing...

“But so everyone who needs to will get a chance to talk, we ask that you keep your sharing to five minutes. And first I want to call on...”

People hopped up and down in their seats going “Me!” “Me!” “Me!” as she waved her finger around like she was deciding who to pick, until the finger landed on her own sternum- “ME!”

“Awwwwwww...” came a cry from the crowd.

She grinned, “And that's what happens when you give power to one of us.”

Nor did she keep her own sharing to five minutes. It was more like eight. She talked about her transition, admitting she had been a member of that small subgroup of transsexuals known as autogynophiles, for whom the desire to be transformed is mostly a sexual fetish; and how once her erotic cravings for physical womanhood had been satisfied she had branched out into what she called “exogynophilia”- being hopelessly turned on by the thought of turning someone else into a woman.

At first she had channeled these desires into stories she wrote, becoming one of the most popular authors of forced femme fiction at a site called HYPERGRAPHIA, but after she got married and settled down in the suburbs, Vicki fell into a cabal of evil, shrewish feminizing housewives who conspired together to turn all their husbands into submissive big-titted nymphomaniac bimbos.

“That really goes on?” whispered her boyfriend.

She nodded. Vicky Nertz and her friends might have been the very ones she'd gotten tips from in the FEMDOMAIN chatroom, when she'd embarked on her own brief career in forced feminization.
.

|||||||||| 8:01 ||||||||||

She hadn't really got much out of Vicki's sharing---the woman still sounded more proud than regretful over the things she had done. And she didn't much care for Gina, who replaced Vicki at the podium when Vicki called on her, who spent her whole five minutes griping about her boss at work (yet the group members applauded her bitching and moaning, and called out a somewhat sardonic, “Keep Coming Back!”; as if Gina especially needed it; And apparently you could just plain dump at these meetings if you needed to, so long as you were also doing the things necessary to turn your life around...)

But the girl Gina picked as she headed back to her seat said some stuff she could relate to, that she could hear something of herself in; as did the older woman that that the girl had picked and every speaker after them. She even related to the big leather clad gay guy, whose name it turned out was David, not Bruno. She listened with interest as he talked about how he managed to make his Ninth Step amends to Bill, and how the relationship he'd lost all hope of ever regaining was beginning again, very cautiously, in a place that felt weird to David but he knew doing it this way was the only chance he had: A place where both partners were on equal footing. Where each was a real person and not a puppet to the other's desires...
.

|||||||||| 8:23 ||||||||||

The sharing ended, the meeting was coming to a close. There was a birthday cake for somebody who had managed to go a year without feminizing anybody, and Vicki handed several people little metal tokens for various other lengths of abstinence from their particular disorder. Nine months, six months, a month. They were even giving out tokens just for showing up.

“Go on, Honey” Her boyfriend Mike whispered. But Shelly would have had to get up there and say, “Hi, I'm Shelly. I'm a forced feminizer.” and it was such an intimidating long way to the front of the room and back. Maybe next time.

Next, time? The thought had surprised her, but she went sure, why not? Mike would like that.

Shelly didn't know it, but she was already in the middle of taking the second step. Since this seemed to be working for these others who were so much like her, she was starting to believe that it might actually be possible for “a power greater than herself" to "restore her to sanity.”

They all got up and join hands, and reading from the placard up at the front of the room, she managed to mumble along as they chanted the Serenity Prayer:

Serenity. Wisdom. Courage. Change...

Maybe, just maybe, she could.
.

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|||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
.

This one's dedicated to Dorothy for the basic idea; and to Julie O for her Protector series (which I alluded to heavily in Candice's speech; hopefully without crossing the line into infringing on her story universe...)

[NOTES: If this story sounded like one big long advertisement for 12 Step recovery programs, it's not. You can do what you want. It was my attempt to describe what a first whatever-anonymous meeting is like for millions of drunks, addicts, gamblers, overeaters, smokers, debtors, codependants, sex addicts, and there's even one for online video games now...

This is a work of FICTION. I don't actually think enjoying forced femme stories leads to acting such fantasies out, or is harmful in any way. But these characters had to come from somewhere. And the notion of autogynephilia turning into 'exogynephilia' was just a bit of silliness that popped into my head with no basis in anything. In this story I was trying to imagine the motivations that drive the women who populate forced femme fiction- why they would possibly do such things to someone. The above was the best I could come up with, and while it's all fairly simplistic pop psychology garbage, it's better than the assumption that seems to hang implicit over so many forced fem stories---and the thing I can't help but find distasteful about them---that these women do it because women are all evil bloodsucking bitches and that's just what we do...