The Spanking Writers

The SSC is a ancient* tradition of the soc.sexuality.spanking newsgroup: it’s a volunteer-run, volunteer-judged yearly contest of spanking stories of no more than 500 words, in several creative categories.

SSC-2006 was run by Kessily, who has just announced the results. All the winning stories and reviews are linked from the results page, which serves as an excellent starting point if you want to some quick, hot reading matter.

Abel and I haven’t entered this year, but lots of our friends have, and some of them even got awards. We’re very proud of them.

———————
* I don’t know how ancient exactly, but it’s no less than 10 years old. In the Internet terms that’s ages, you know.

In a black cab crossing London en route to a meeting. We’re chatting about allergies. A colleague comments:

“My daughter R—— is extremely allergic to birch pollen.”

Damned good excuse, for a naughty girl, if you ask me…

Coincidentally, the cab then swung into a narrow side street to take a short cut. Its name? Birchin Lane. Honestly. I couldn’t wait to get to the Internet to look up stories of the ancient whipping posts that must have lined the route (albeit it seemed a little too narrow for a good flogging). I was fascinated by the real origins, albeit a little disappointed:

Eilert Ekwall… postulates that the name means “lane of the barbers,” from an unrecorded Old English word, beardceorfere. He points out that the Middle English cherven (from OE ceorfan), meaning “to cut,” was used specifically for the cutting of hair

Wrong type of cuts, sadly.

Prize for the phrase of the week goes to a friend who recently posted her first comment to our blog. She responded to the usual first-timer’s notice that we would review her entry before it appeared on the site by emailing to say that:

I found the idea that I was “awaiting moderation” most tantalising

Now that is what I call a cool line. Hot, too

Any married spanko couples out there are merely continuing age-old traditions, as a fascinating article on “Russia before Peter the Great” confirms.

In Russia, the husbands and wives of common people were closer than were the husbands and wives of the upper classes. Christian tradition among the Russians held them to the belief that a husband had authority over his wife, and it was common for a religiously devout husband to discipline his wife by beating her. But among common folks a husband and wife were likely to be friends, and to remain friends despite the beatings.

‘Despite’, or ‘because of’?!

As for the upper clases:

While still adolescents, girls might be married to someone the father had decided was appropriate … The father would order the girl to stand with him and be introduced to her husband-to-be. It was common for a little ceremony to follow. The father would touch his daughter’s back with a coiled whip and say that she would now be free of his authority but that he was passing that authority to her future husband who, in his stead, would admonish her with this same whip, which he then gave to the husband-to-be. Carrying on the ritual, the husband-to-be declared that he believed that he would have no need to use the whip, and he attached it to his belt.

They even had kinky literature:

If the wife of an upperclass man was disobedient he might beat her. A work dating back to 1556, called The Household Management Code, attributed to a monk named Sylvester, advised that a disobedient wife should be whipped, with politeness rather than anger, and in secret.

Drat: blogging about the spankings afterwards would have been out, then.

Why have I never before heard of the British drama series “Upstairs, Downstairs”? Seriously, what sort of a spanko am I, completely ignorant of a whole 5 seasons’ worth of masters, maids, butlers and their very fabulous costumed interactions?

Well, that’s been remedied this week, when I switched the TV on at an unusual for me hour, to find a girl in a housemaid’s dress having a royal tantrum in the kitchen, with an older maid and a butler frowning at her.

A bit of research online has disclosed that the maid is Daisy Peel, that there is a war on, which is why, although she’s doing a proper petulant foot-stomping routine, she isn’t getting sacked.

Daisy is unhappy about her workload, you see, and she whinges that she should have gone off to work in a munitions factory where they have rules against slavery. Throughout the episode she makes various blunders, like repeating in the kitchen what she’d heard discussed in the parlour, and letting in a guest when the mistress is not at home.

The butler, Mr. Hudson, complains that were these the ordinary times, he wouldn’t hestitate to see that she is put off without a reference.

“But these are not the ordinary times,” Rose, the older maid says. “Housemaids are worth their weight in gold!”

I know what to do if the girl can’t be fired! I know! Do you?

Although we usually avoid viral memes that strike the blogging world, some things are impossible to avoid. One of these is Catmas (formerly BlogACatMas): a tradition wherein every first Friday in October is dedicated to posting pictures of cats.*

Thus, let us introduce our perverted animal. She insisted on helping Abel catalogue our toys:

* Not sure why there needs to be a special day for this, because people post pictures of their cats all the time anyway. But there you have it.

For those who have already looked up “spanking” in every available dictionary, may I introduce you to a Text To Speech machine.

You type in any phrase… and the thing says it back to you in any of a variety of voices, with a corresponding picture moving its lips in synch.

For some reason when I was on the page, the girl in the picture kept admitting to needing a spanking, and then kept begging to keep her panties on, and pleading for the spanking to stop. Shame they didn’t have a male picture that could issue orders.

Now, because this is a demo, you can only do 4 phrases at a time, but you can go in and out as many times as you like.

Make sure you do your chores first, or don’t go blaming me for what you get!

(Thank you, Kessily, for the priceless link.)

The weekend newspapers usually offer rich pickings for the likes of us, and the most recent Sunday Times duly obliged with a nicely-illustrated article listing “What Men Want”. Number 38 of their top 50 was:

Every now and again to be able to proudly and rightfully accuse his woman of being a pervert.

I think I just about score a tick in the box on that front.

Having “depraved invitations whispered in crowded places” was another that certainly range true for me (as did “for his woman to look good” and “being proud of his woman”). I couldn’t say the same about quite all of the questions, though, so if anyone has a spare Aston Martin DB9 that they want to send my way, I’d be eternally grateful.

I have been doing some housekeeping around the blog, so you may notice a few changes.

Firstly, there are some new links. We’ve recently added:

Brat Under Control
Spankers Blog
Pandora’s Blog
Ruby Redd’s Spanking Pages
Tara’s Trysts

Secondly, several people have written to us asking where they can read our stories. I distinctly remembered putting a link to them on the blog when I was building it, but apparently, the link got buried in the depth of the sidebar. I’ve moved it to a more prominent position, but meanwhile, to save you clicking, here’s a quote from that page:

Both of us write lots of spanking stories. We’ll be publishing these (free) on this site soon. In the meantime, you can read some of Abel’s stories here, and some of Haron’s here.

Oh yeah, that new story site where all of our spanking stories are going? It’s on the way. Seriously. It’s only been three years since I’ve started building it. For those of you who were worried that after my thesis was finished Abel wouldn’t have anything to punish me for… you’re so wrong.

We were browsing with a kinky friend in a tiny second-hand bookstore. We’re deep into the old children’s storybooks, biographies, history texts – anything that might turn up anecdotes with kink potential.

In walks a new customer. “Do you have any old school textbooks?” he asks the bookseller – before looking surprised, and not a little embarrassed, when we three burst simultaneously into fits of giggles!