The Spanking Writers

Sometimes my imagination wanders into very dark places indeed. I developed a reality TV show concept in my sleep a few weeks ago, for example, and have been toying ever since with whether or not to blog it. The sort of thing I’ve shared with Haron, and a couple of friends, all of whom have grimaced, paused, and then given a guilty smile and a “It shouldn’t be. But that’s hot.”

The inspiration’s fairly clear – a cross between ‘V for Vendetta’ and ‘Sulphuric Acid’ (a remarkable, disturbing, brilliant novel by Belgian author Amelie Nothomb), mixed with the dawn of this year’s Freshers’ weeks around the country.

At the start of my dream, one of said new students is kidnapped, and taken to a dark, windowless room. Unbeknownst to her, her movements are being observed by a myriad of hidden cameras, broadcasting live to the nation. She’s well looked after – other, of course, than having been deprived of her freedom. Food is passed in to her at regular intervals, the staff check on her regularly. Uncannily, the books they also provide are just to her taste – almost as if someone had been observing her closely before snatching her from the street.

It’s the second evening’s broadcast that offers the viewers their first chance to join in. They’d been shown pictures of the punishment chamber. The various implements had been displayed, explained. The early show allowed them to vote: “Choose your implement now. Call or send a text message now!

The method of punishment duly selected (and the option of ‘No punishment’ having been soundly rejected), the later edition that evening allowed the general public to choose the number of strokes. Live on TV, the young woman would thus be stripped, showered, taken to the punishment room, and thrashed according to public demand.

The series would comprise more than just floggings; other tortures would be on offer too for the viewers’ delectation and the girl’s torment. Until, eventually, the public were bored of her: one night, the option to ‘Choose another girl’ would be offered. The incumbent would be abandoned, dazed and confused, at some remote roadside; the producers would set off to capture their next unwitting star.

The bus jerked to a sudden halt at the stop, the driver having seen the girl’s ever-so-belatedly outstretched hand at the very last moment. He opened the doors; she stepped back.

“Are you getting on?”

“Sorry, wrong bus.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Sorry. I misread the number.” And she turned to walk away.

But she hadn’t bargained for the officers of the Transport Authority Police Service, ordering her to turn around. “You seem to be stopping a lot of buses this afternoon, young lady.”

For they’d had complaints, see. She’d been there making mischief for the past hour or more, forcing every passing service to pull to a stop at the very last minute.

‘Wilfully endangering the travelling public’ was the charge. The punishment? A fine, perhaps, or a few days at the Re-Education Centre. Well, that – and there’d be the call they would place to her father, who’d no doubt be quite dismayed at his daughter’s misconduct and arrest.

Or… They could deal with the matter back at the police station. In one of the cells. In private. No forms filled in; no record of the incident. Other than the stripes, which would no doubt continue to teach her a lesson every time she sat down for the coming week…

(This story is a true account of my journey to work one morning last week. At least, it’s true to start with. It rather veers off at a certain point!)

It was approaching closing time in the library when I happened to pick up the journal that was sitting in the rack directly in front of my nose. “Past and Present”, published by the Oxford University Press, turned out to cover an eclectic range of historical topics. Such as “Wife beating and manliness in late antiquity”.

Now the idea of a beating is rather disturbing: it implies a level of violence and degree of non-consent that’s not at all kinky. LOL I far prefer spanking. But some of the anecdotes in the article could certainly spark the pervy imagination.

Take something as simple as the law passed in 449AD in the eastern Roman empire by Theodosius II:

A wife could divorce her husband with full return of her dowry ‘if she could prove that he has inflicted flogging (verbera) on her’… The term ‘verbera’ imples that the type of beating imagined was with whips or canes, long associated with slaves.

Wannabe slave girls form an orderly queue, please!

But in the next century, Justinian’s legislation…

…rescinded a wife’s right to repudiation, but gave her the recourse of a heavy fine on an abusive husband. Wives whose husbands beat them with ‘whips or sticks” (‘flagellis aut fustibus’) could demand compensation equivalent to a third of their bride gift.

The fine was only to be paid if the beating took place ‘without any of the reasons which we have ordered would suffice for the dissolution of a marriage against wives’. The implication here is that husbands were within their rights to whip or beat wives who had given them serious grounds to suspect infidelity, such as dining or bathing with other men, or spending the night away from home without the husband’s permission.

Spending the night away with the husband’s permission was presumably fine. (Hey, perhaps the Romans tolerated poly relationships!)

Meanwhile, in the western empire, the law was a little stricter. Augustine of Hippo describes how a husband was supposed to deal with misbehaviour:

If he found his wife…looking through the window excessively, he would correct her not only with words but with blows. Yet if she should say to him, “why are you beating me”… then he should consider… how he might deliver just floggings for the correction of his own family.

The wife in this anecdote commits two faults – looking out of her window too often (behaviour associated with prostitutes) and talking back to her husband when he tries to correct her. Here, as elsewhere, Augustine considers such corporal discipline of a wife to be perfectly acceptable, a necessary part of men’s oversight of their households…

Apparently, “Augustine considered corporal discipline, when motivated by the desire for correction, to be a sign of affection”, and quite right too!

OK, hands up who else found the Latin phrases hot!

I have suspected that Facebook may, after all, have redeeming features, and Sebastian Shakespeare in the “New Statesman” has recently discovered it:

I was once invited to join a group called Caned, which was set up on the anniversary of the abolition of corporal punishment in schools. “Were you one of the last to get a wallop? Did you deliver a walloping?” I had no intention of wearing my stripes in public. But scrolling through the comments on the group’s wall I came across Times trencherman Giles Coren’s theories on corporal punishment. “To be honest I doubt anyone who was caned would be on Facebook,” he remarked. “People that old aren’t, are they?” Well, Giles, I have news for you. I was caned and I am on Facebook.

I would like to suggest a poll: who else thinks that the person starting the group in the first place is kinky, and was looking for real-life caning accounts?

Our favourite library turned up a lovely book of reminiscences called “A Victorian Boyhood”, written by Lawrence Evelyn Jones in 1955. The title seemed full of potential – and when we saw that a third of the volume was simply entitled ‘Eton’, we started quickly scanning its pages for interesting anecdotes.

However, aside from one very brief mention of ‘swishing’, the book was short on descriptions of traditional Etonian discipline*. But there were a few sections that would doubtless hit the spot for anyone fascinated by the English public school.

First up: fagging:

[We] never ceased to wonder at our enjoyment of things such as fagging. For myself, my heart leapt up when Cockerell, who rowed in the Eight and was in ‘Pop’, told me after prayers to put a can of water in his bath, or sent me with a note to his friend George Lloyd.

To be free, if only a valet, [in] Cockerell’s room, where the Rules of the Eton Society were framed in light-blue ribbons and the white cap of the Eight hung upon the corner of a picture, was to taste privilege indeed.

But more impressive was his description of the man who served as Eton’s headmaster from 1884 to 1905:

Dr Warre, as we saw him, was greatness itself. I do not think it would be possible to exaggerate the prestige he had with us boys. Even today, I cannot imagine myself a contemporary of Warre’s, someone who could call him ‘Edmond’, pat him on the back, chaff him about his school-mastery ways… There must surely have been such friends in his life, for he was warm-hearted, affectionate, and entirely without pomposity. But no, Imagination refuses to contemplate such persons.

Warre stood alone solitary in his majesty. His physical presence, when he swept into a classroom on one of his periodic visitations, was overpowering; even a tough character like Mr. Impey, all sang-froid and disdain, became pliant and courtier-like when the Head came striding in, and Mr. Dyer ceased, temporarily, to exist.

Warre’s authority was quite remarkable:

And that reminds me of a sad, shameful episode. There was a visiting preacher who never should have been invited. Tiny, round, and red, with a voice like Mr. Punch, he was too small for the pulpit [and] kept falling off his stool… Throughout his sermon he appeared and disappeared over the rim of the pulpit with rhythmical alternation.

It would have been funny at a circus; in Chapel the effect was overwhelming. Yet nobody laughed; so small was he, that the point taken was not the absurdity of his eclipses, but the gallantry of his reappearances.

These began to be applauded, by a stamping of feet upon the wooden cross-bars of the desks – at first a controlled stamping by a small group, but one that gradually spread and swelled until every time he bobbed up again twelve hundred boots drummed out grateful acknowledgment.

There was nothing he could do but go on; there was nothing the Masters could do but become engrossed in the details of the Chapel roof; even the Headmaster could only chew the inside of his cheek and gaze sternly into space..

Next day came the inevitable summons to Upper School ‘after twelve”. Never was Warre so quiet or telling. He was not angry: he was heartbroken. He did not talk of irreverence or sacrilege. He simply said that he could not have believed that Eton boys would be so rude to a guest, to an old friend of his own. There were no punishments, no deprivations. He showed us his heartbreak and left it at that. We went away thoroughly ashamed.

Not a mention of a birching – yet I bet a fair few readers will have gone weak at the knees!

* When I used Word’s spell-check on this entry, it thought I was writing about ‘Estonian discipline’. If anyone has any interesting information on spankings in the Baltic States, you are of course most welcome to share…

We hereby stake a claim to the prize for the first mention of Christmas on a spanking blog in 2008!

If you’re starting to think about presents for kinky friends, we’d like to remind you that our anthology of the best of The Spanking Writers is available to buy from all good bookstores. It’s packed with 300 pages of spanking-related ideas, anecdotes, stories and startles – and the feedback we’ve had from those who’ve bought it to date has been really good!

You can buy this great stocking-filler from Amazon in the US, UK or worldwide – or direct from our distributor Lulu.com, which we would prefer, as we get more money that way. But ultimately, what matters is that you buy, read and enjoy it.

End of shameless plug. (Hey, it’s our blog. We’re allowed to, just once in a while, right?!)

The girl ran at full pelt across the bridge in Central Station, holding her boyfriend’s hand as they ran. The 16:03 was still in the platform: perhaps they might still make it?

They were half way down the stairs (taken two at a time) when the guard’s whistle sounded. We glimpsed them again on the platform, moments later, pleading for him to revoke his order, praying that the electric doors would slide open once more and let them on board. But it was too late: the train had started to glide from the platform on its journey north. She turned to her boyfriend, and buried her head against his shoulder; he hugged her, as the tears started to flow.

For her father knew that the library closed at one. He’d warned her last week when she’d returned home so late, and not for the first time – clearly suspicious as to how she might have passed so much time alone in the city. A final warning, ominous in implication.

And three hours could – just – have been explained away, had he been in a good mood. The library stayed open a little longer; she had to grab some lunch; there was a book she needed to look at in Waterstone’s. The previous train had been delayed, cancelled; hers had broken down, been subject to failing signals. (Surely he wouldn’t phone the train company to check?)

But the extra hour? She knew full well the implication, and the thought of daddy’s unforgiving belt was almost too much to bear…

PS actually, they caught the train, but you know how our minds work!!!

Next time we play a domestic scene, I’ll give Abel this useful manual from 1905, “Home Education” by Charlotte M. Mason:

Rewards and punishments should be relative consequences of conduct. …they should be natural, or, at any rate, the relative consequences of conduct: should imitate, as nearly as may be without injury to the child, the treatment which such and such conduct deserves and receives in after life.

In many cases, the natural consequences of the child’s fault is precisely that which it is [the mother's] business to avert, while, at the same time, she looks about for some consequence related to the fault which shall have an educative bearing on the child. For instance, if a boy neglects his studies, the natural consequence is that he remains ignorant; but to allow him to do so would be criminal neglect on the part of the parent.

I think, as a pretend-child I should be allowed some input into this terribly difficult decision.

“That’s OK, Daddy, I’ll take the consequences and remain ignorant! It’ll be awfully hard on me, but I’m sure I deserve it! What, a spanking? That’s not natural consequences!”

I wonder if that’ll work.

The denizens of countless vanilla discussion boards pass the time swapping anecdotes, opinions, advice. But sooner or later, one of the residents posts the inevitable – sparked by some passing comment, a particular date on the calendar, the sight in the shopping mall of a certain of her former teachers: “Did you get whacked at school?”

One such debate recently brought forth an outpouring of recollections, as the (largely female) community confessed their shameful secrets: yes, they had been called before their principals to be punished.

One young lady from Carolina clearly winced at the memory. Towards the end of her school career, she’d been required to get a parental signature on some form or other. Although she was a good and bright girl, she forgot, being rather absent-minded. So too did some of her friends, so their teacher gave them a second chance – but warned that anyone forgetting this time would be paddled. And when she arrived empty-handed the following morning, the teacher was as good as his word, and despatched her to see the principal to be punished – and this in a school in which the paddling of girls was almost unknown.

The real-life me feels sorry for her, of course. Kinky me can’t help but be fascinated by the example of a good girl in trouble.