The Spanking Writers

I wonder what should happen to young ladies who don’t turn their phones off in the cinema?

I went to the cinema yesterday, and sat in an almost entirely empty auditorium, with only a few people scattered about. One of these, a young woman in my row, spent the first half an hour playing with her phone. It was, in fairness to her, on silent, but the screen glowed brightly somewhere on my right, and was a bit distracting. When the movie got interesting, she tucked it away in her pocket, but as far as I’m concerned, the offence had been committed by then.

Wouldn’t it be convenient, I thought, if the cinema staff could yank the offenders out of the auditorium for a quick spanking? You could just leave if you wanted to, but if you preferred to continue watching the film, you’d have to follow a staff member to an office somewhere. A short, effective lesson – and you can go back to your seat to enjoy the rest of your movie, if you can face sitting down for a while.

The added embarrassment of the situation is that people working in the cinema are usually just about old enough to see certificate-18 films, and getting your licks from one of these youths would be, I imagine, excruciatingly uncomfortable. An added incentive to turn off your phone, keep chattering to a minimum, and crunch pop-corn quietly.

Today being Sunday, I was hoping to sleep late, but unfortunately I was woken up way too early by the neighbours’ dog barking its head off.

I’m convinced that the dog was disturbed by the neighbours’ pair of teenagers trying to sneak out for the day. (I like to think there’s a boy and a girl, maybe 17 and 16.) Some of their friends are going on a day-trip to the woods with some guitars and alcohol, but these kids’ parents have said no to this last pre-school adventure.

Reasoning that they’d just get up and go, and face the consequences later, the pair tried to get out of the attic window, onto the roof of the garage, onto the fence, then down and away. They hadn’t reckoned on the dog getting so very excited to see them as they carefully climbed down.

Discovered by Dad in the act of sneaking out, they were unceremoniously marched inside by their ears. “What do you think you’re doing?” their father asked. “Leaving the house by the window? Is there a fire?”

“Mmm-no,” the girl would mumble.

“Well, there’ll be a fire soon. On your behinds. Over the back of the sofa, both of you.”

The pair of teenagers looked at each other miserably, each wondering how they would live down the shame of their sibling seeing them spanked. They’ve been spanked often enough, it’s true, but not in front of each other – not since they were in primary school.

Their dad, meanwhile, had no qualms. He marched briefly into the kitchen and emerged with a small wooden cutting board with a convenient grip handle.

“Oh, Dad!” the boy exclaimed, seeing this.

“Face in the cushions, and I don’t want to hear any nonsense from either of you.”

The father paddled the two behinds with thoroughness and zeal. The kids yowled their pain and embarrassment into the sofa cushions.

Out in the yard, the dog was barking happily, thinking they were talking to him.

I reckon that’s why I didn’t hear any paddling or crying sounds. The dog was too loud.

The Venice film festival, the 67^th, has just opened. My eye was caught recently by details of a movie that was shown at last year’s gathering, entitled ‘La nave delle donne maledette’ – ‘The Ship of Lost Women’.

Directed by Raffaello Matarazzo in 1954, the film had been rediscovered – and, it seems, deservedly so:

In Spain in the 17^th century the daughter of a heavily in debt noble gentleman is celebrating her marriage to a rich man who could save the family. During the party, a policeman arrives who accuses the bride of having killed a newly born illegitimate baby.

In order to save the family’s name and fortune, the bride and her father put pressure on the young cousin of the bride who lives out of their charity to take the blame and let herself be accused.  Though the bride and her father had assured her of a light sentence, the poor girl is sentenced to forced labour in the New World.

The bride and her husband embark on the same ship that will take the cousin and a large group of unfortunate women to a life of misery.  When the aristocratic bride manages to have her cousin whipped for rebellion, the women prisoners start a violent mutiny, gaining most of the sailors to their n cause, shouting “We are free” and exposing both their will of freedom… and their attractive bodies.

When the women and their men partisans have won the ship and harshly punished the evil aristocrats, a frenzy of dance, sex and alcohol take possession of the ship.

“Needless to say, the film suffered heavy cuts from the Italian censors of the time”, the review notes. Fortunately, the original print had survived. I’m wondering how many of those in the audience went home that evening to play out scenes… and whether it’s available on Amazon!

Why might a girl be hiding away in a barn? I only ask because that’s at the heart of a little spanking scene that’s been playing itself out in my daydreams lately, but I can’t fathom a sensible starting point for my plot.

The spanking side of the equation is pretty clear. A girl in a big house is caught stealing food. She’s questioned, and merely complains that she was hungry. A spanking ensues – hard, but not excessive, for one can’t expect a girl to starve, much as one disapproves of theft. “Misguided”, she’d be told. “If you’re hungry, ask.”

Yet a few days later, someone (the butler?) notices the same girl stealing food once more, hiding it in her dress, and sneaking out of a back door of the house. He trails her from a distance, and spies her heading towards the outbuildings. The girl sneaks into a barn; our detective follows, quietly following her inside. There, to his surprise, he hears two voices from the hayloft – so he climbs a ladder and finds both his quarry and another lass of a similar age, who’s greedily tucking into the stolen food.

They’d be taken back to the big house, of course. The young thief would be whipped, severely, as would their uninvited guest. But where had this latter girl come from? A childhood best friend, seeking sanctuary with the one person who’d help her? Turned out by her parents? Dismissed from her post as a maid at some other country estate? In flight, having been handed over to be married against her will?

And, whilst I’m pondering the unknowns: who was the girl who was helping her? Was she really a servant, as I’d initially envisaged? Or was she maybe the daughter of the master of the house? Had she known the hideaway at all – or simply found the girl, tired and hungry, in her hiding place and taken pity on her.

Oh how I love working out the whys and wherefores of spanking scenes!

My dreams have been very appropriate to the start of September, the traditional back-to-school time. I dreamed that I was, indeed, back to school, starting my last year. There was a great deal of pomp and circumstance to do with the final year students being nearly grown-ups, but also we got reminded a lot to wear our uniforms, to be polite to teachers and to do the homework promptly. And yes, there would be corporal punishment when we didn’t do well enough.

My dream self was baffled by the contrast between being expected to behave like a responsible adult and yet to be treated like a child in many respects, including very possibly being caned. The uniform was particularly constricting: I thought I should be allowed to choose my own clothing.

The dream ended with me about to be caned by the deputy headmistress for initiating some sort of uniform protest in the corridors. I woke up incredibly upset about it.

How strange that something that I’m so fond of in real life would prove to be the subject of so much angst in a dream.

Marxist writers have cropped up here before as sources of spanking references, and here’s one from the man himself. I’m not entirely sure that, when Karl and his friend Engels were writing, appealing to the kinky community 150 or so years later was really their key goal. But I rather liked this, first published: in Die Presse, June 20, 1862.

Humanity in England, like liberty in France, has now become an export article for the traders in politics.

We recollect the time when Tsar Nicholas had Polish ladies flogged by soldiers and when Lord Palmerston found the moral indignation of some parliamentarians over the event “impolitic”.

We recollect that about a decade ago a revolt took place on the Ionian Islands… which gave the English governor there occasion to have a fairly considerable number of Grecian women flogged. Probatum est, said Palmerston and his Whig colleagues who at that time were in office.

Flogging Polish girls is clearly a good thing. (Hi, Kami!). As for the women in Greece: I’m curious as to how many constitute “a fairly considerable number”. Are we talking four rabble-rousers brought to the governor’s office and held down over a table for a birching, or a hundred stripped and whipped in the market place? Typical Marx: fascinating writing, but so deeply flawed.

In a supermarket the other day two children were messing around a lot. They played a game that looked like a mix of catch and nuclear warfare. Their minder, a girl of about 20, wasn’t even trying to calm them down – she was trying to finish her shopping and get out.

I imagined that she was the family’s au-pair. What she didn’t realise was that one of her employers’ neighbours was also in the shop, and saw the children running wild. The neighbour phoned their father that evening, just a friendly call to let him know that the au-pair might not be doing her job as well as she might.

The father called the girl into an empty living room for a talk. He realised, he said, that his children could be difficult, but she couldn’t just ignore bad behaviour and hope it would go away.
The girl said contritely that she understood, and that she would do better.

This promise wasn’t enough. In a bid to demonstrate that bad behaviour shouldn’t be ignored, the father instructed her to lower her jeans and bend over the sofa cushions. Knowing the procedure, she meekly leaned forward as he unbuckled his belt and slid it out of the loops.

The whipping that followed was not unduly harsh, but firm enough that the girl was tearful and sore by the end. Her promises of better work were far more sincere and convincing. The father allowed her to stand, then gave her a warm hug, reassuring her that he wasn’t angry, and was merely doing what was necessary.

The girl sniffled into his shirt and took mental notes.

The setting: a discussion I was leading recently with a group of senior managers.

The issue: their complaint that they spend too much time on internal bureaucracy, and (as a result) not enough looking after their customers.

My contribution: “has anyone heard of Janus?”

They looked blank, so I carefully wrote the word up on the flipchart: JANUS. In block capitals. Where it remained, to my great delight, for the remainder or the workshop.

(Clearly, I was talking about the Roman god, whose two faces look in opposite directions – rather like said managers, forever trying to focus both internally and externally. Any suggestion that I might have been referring to the famous Soho spanking shop or the magazine of the same name would be entirely misplaced. But I was a little disappointed that none of the ladies in the discussion blushed and squirmed uncomfortably in their seats).

Oh, but this story is making my spanking hand itch something awful.

How about this: two Swedish schoolgirls bought bugging equipment in a gadget shop and installed it in the teachers’ common room.

Seriously. They did. They got caught when one of them bragged about it on Facebook, thus failing Spying 101 in a rather spectacular manner. The real-life result of this was a court case, a guilty verdict and a hefty fine.

I picture a different outcome. There would be an after-school staff meeting which the pair of girls would be ordered to attend. A chair would be placed in the middle of the room, and the girls would have to bend over its back one after the other, skirts up and knickers lowered to their ankles. The Headmaster would administer a full dozen of cane strokes to each upturned bottom, with the whole teaching staff looking on.

Afterwards, the minutes of the staff meeting, including the two canings, would be posted on the school’s Facebook page, with links to the girls’ profiles.

That’s only fair, no?

Any of you know what an ‘odalisque’ is? I confess that I had to look it up when I encountered a blog entitled ‘Not an Odalisque’ recently – drawn to it by a post in which the author took in inspiration from a meeting with our dear friend HH (himself author of the excellent “The Art of Corporal Punishment”). It’s the final feature in our week of our favourite posts from other blogs:

It got me wondering why I don’t blog about kink… Kinksters aren’t a poor, oppressed group, but they aren’t exactly accepted, either. I don’t just mean the tabloid treatment of Max Mosley or the “dungeon” owners in Devon. I mean the scare-mongering about causal links between violent pornography and rape. I mean the idea that a woman doesn’t have the agency to choose to be submissive. I mean the worry I feel that I may lose credibility if I tell you too much about myself.

That’s one reason I haven’t gone into detail about my kink, but it’s also a reason why I should. The problem is that I don’t have a final answer on what my kink is. Sexuality is infinitely malleable, and finding a vocabulary to write about it may change it. The fetish community displays a striking uniformity of bizarre tastes….

Does it sound like I’m making excuses? I suspect that I am. I don’t want to tell you about my kink because I’m haunted by everyone who ever disapproved. The ex-boyfriend who dug for evidence of buried childhood trauma. The ex-boyfriend who thought it was an all-access pass. The confused vanilla friends. They combine into an angel on my shoulder telling me that if only I were to stop wanting kinky things, I could be good and pure and loveable, citizen of a lemon-scented world and creator of incredibly fluffy cakes.

That angel is nothing, however, in comparison to the fear that feminists inspire. You see, I know that when the things I fantasise about happen, they really aren’t fun… Every time I see a kinkster talk about his “natural dominance” or “a woman’s place” I feel as if I’ve committed an act of violence against feminism.

One final worry: I secretly snigger at other people’s kinks. Sometimes they make me feel vaguely ill. You might, too.

Were those good enough reasons? No, I didn’t think so. So I’m going to try to tell you about my kink…

I like to be in somebody’s power. I like to feel that there’s no way out, no way to re-establish my own will, and my only option is to do as I’m told. That’s not enough, though, otherwise I would enjoy getting stuck in traffic jams. I like to be valued. I rather like being rewarded when I’m good: instant justice from an immediate authority. Even being disapproved of, or punished, is proof that somebody cares. And—oh!—I like to be punished. I like it even when it’s not fair. Maybe especially when it’s not fair. And when, unfairly, my protestations that it’s not fair have been silenced on pain of even more punishment…

I want more than a beating, of course. It’s all the parts. It’s when I can’t meet someone’s eye in case he sees what I’m thinking. It’s his slow, deliberate movements, when I’m almost trembling but he’s in no rush. It’s wondering what he’s going to do with his belt as he takes it off. Blushing. Squirming. Being held down by someone’s weight. It’s gasping for air. It’s clinging on to him for dear life afterwards. It’s thumbprints around my wrists in the morning and bruises I didn’t know I had…

So, there you have it, as coherent an account of my kink as I am able to give. You’d better tell me whether or not you want to hear more. I’ll try my very best to do as I’m told.

For any of you wondering, BTW, an odalisque “was a female slave in an Ottoman seraglio”. And IMHO any blog as well-written as this is well worth following.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this little annual selection of other authors’ and illustrators’ work. Hopefully it’s introduced a few readers to a few sites they may not have known before – and, at the least, it’s recognised some of the folks whose work we enjoy.