The Spanking Writers

This morning I was supervising the warming of milk in the microwave. This involved bending over at the waist, so that I could see what was happening in there.

Abel walked past. Stopped. Looked at me. (I saw him reflected in the glass door of the microwave.)

“Hmm,” he said, and casually lifted the hem of my morning dress. “Stay there.”

The thing about milk is that you absolutely cannot leave it unsupervised, otherwise it will explode out of its mug and try to take over the kitchen. Even if I was tempted to flee, I was effectively tied to the domestic appliance, like a 1950s wife.

I watched in the glass as Abel went to the next room and picked up a branch of pussy willow out of a big floor vase. He moved towards me with menace in his step, and gave me a hard slash across the bottom.

“Owww!” I said, and then said something rude. And then my milk started boiling, so I scrambled to subdue it.

Abel quietly examined my bottom in search of a mark. “It’s right there!” I said, pointing at a spot that felt like somebody sliced it with a knife.

“No mark,” said Abel sulkily. “Obviously, it wasn’t hard enough. There’re bits of pussy willow all over the kitchen, young lady; pick them up.”

I stuck out my lower lip, commenting that bending over in this house was some sort of magical clue for people to appear behind you with implements.

Abel asked whether I wished to tell him that I hadn’t bent over with exactly that purpose in mind.

Ah. Well. If you put it like that…

When I sat down at my desk yesterday morning to work, the house felt strangely quiet and still. 

I glanced around my office, and spied the school desk, folded neatly against the wall. And suddenly my daydreams tranported me to life as a Headmaster, the desk in the middle of the room, the gentle knock at the door.

A girl came in – a girl I liked; a prefect. And whilst it was far from uncommon for girls in the school to be caned, it was exceptionally rare for prefects to receive corporal punishment. Yet on this occasion, I had little choice.

Prefects were dealt with somewhat differently to the rest of the pupils, as she well knew. Tradition dictated a birching, rather than the cane.

We discussed her offence; she apologised profusely. And then I asked her to remove her blazer and take off her knickers, and to bend over the desk. On instruction, she reached back and lifted her skirt, then bent right forward and held on tight.

Twenty strokes, the tradition had it. An examplary punishment for a girl who should have known better and set the  example. She held on bravely at first; the sixth stroke made her yelp;  she whimpered through the next few, sobbed for the remainder.

And then I made her stand, and she apologised, and we went through with the final part of  the routine. For she would be suspended from her duties for one week. I asked her to remove her prefectorial tie and hand it to me, her fingers trembling as she replaced it with the ordinary school tie I offered her in return. We would reverse the exchange seven days later…

Somehow concentrating on my morning’s work was rather tough after that

While yesterday’s post is getting some fascinating responses, I recommend that you read the article Pandora posted last night, spinning off the topic of guilt attacks, but in a way I haven’t encountered before:

But for me, and I expect millions of other people, kinky and vanilla, there is a third circle in the Venn diagram of discomfort: the fascination of the horrific. I am drawn to stories of child abuse, serial killers and human tragedies in the way that other people watch horror films. I have no interest whatsoever in horror fiction but I find stories of human suffering/cruelty/torture very difficult to look away from. I seek them out, and it’s not a kinky interest – just a fascination.

Be sure to read the comments!

Our friend Emma-Jane has written an interesting post on her blog (which is brand new, by the way: check it out) about struggling to reconcile being a kinky Irish girl with hearing about the results of the Ryan report into child abuse in Irish State Institutions:

“An emotionally abusive institution. Girls were humiliated and belittled on a regular basis”

Sounds like the brochure for a reformatory roleplay my friends are planning.

“CP was often administered in front of other girls and staff members. The use of denigrating and humiliating language was commonplace”

Sounds like the type of scene I’ve been fantasising about all my life.

“Physical punishment was severe, excessive and pervasive”

Sounds like a description of my latest play weekend.

Yes, well. I’m not going to make anyone feel better if I say that, without taking on and processing different kinds of violence visited by one human being on another throughout history, we would be bereft of any settings for role-play. The stuff we feed on, from Roman slaves, via Victorian maids, to nearly modern schoolchildren, is in its core quite appalling.

How much of it you then make it yours, whether you decide to play with certain aspects of it at all, is then a sensitive individual choice.

Abel and I discussed this the other day, and he wondered whether his ease or difficulty in accepting his own desires depends on how recent the historical event that triggers the fantasies. Does the fact that the Irish schoolchildren of the reports are real people who may be still not quite into their middle age, amplify the guilt?

When he said this, I wondered out loud how, then, the role-play involving trafficked Eastern European girls – who are our actual contemporaries – works out better for him. For me this is a semi-hard limit: I will only go there with one of a handful of extremely trusted tops, and only to please them as opposed to entertain my own desires. Abel, on the other hand, has independent fantasies in the white slavery milieu.

I think that, rather than being a question of historical proximity, our comfort level depends on how personal the story of the suffering is to us. History helps, to an extent, to soften the grip of guilt, but it’s personal involvement that creates qualms and hardens limits.

And it is, unfortunately, something each of us has to work through in our heads, alone with the shadows in our consciousness.

Rembrandt Square in Amsterdam sounds as though it should be full of artists painting elderly ladies, against a dark backdrop of old townhouses. Instead, it hosts a somewhat run-down flea market

I’d been pondering the idea of buying a pair of old wooden skates, which had real potential as an unconventional spanking implement. (Girls come home late in the snow, get warmed up…). I decided against it, unsure whether the blades would be permitted on my return flight.

So I moved on to the next stall along, which just happened to consist of large boxes of porn DVDs, sorted by genre. I rifled through the S&M box, noting the titles:

“Prefects’ spanks”
“Punishment at home”
“British amateur spanking”
“English punishment series 3″
“Hit me please”
“Neil Sedaka – Live in Birmingham”

Yes, really. It does seem a tad cruel that watching said gig is now officially classed as masochist.

Amsterdam’s full of canals, right? Rather like Venice, only colder and less enchanting – but full of the most amazingly cute girls!.

My suite overlooked on one of the main stretches of water; tourist boats plied up and down, and the hotel even had its own launch. What interested me, though, was the number of privately-chartered vessels – frequently hosting parties of slightly inebriated, terribly over-exhuberant locals. I wondered how long it’d be before I’d spied a Dutch girl being soundly shagged in the bottom of one of the passing craft.

And then I thought of one of the ancient uses of the canals, sadly little recorded in history (mainly because I’d just made it up). Public floggings were commonplace across Europe; some jurisdictions took that further and had offenders whipped through the streets.

Only, in Amsterdam, with its canals…? Outside the courthouse, the convicted girl would be stripped and tied tightly to the frame atop the whipping boat. The captain would set sail – a meandering route, from one canal to the next, the punishment officer lashing the prisoner periodically as they went. Justice could not have been more clearly seen to have been done…

Yesterday, there was a sound spanking occurring in our bedroom (not of me, but I was present, along with a small group of spectators). The hairbrush was making the awesome cracking sounds you expect when a wooden surface connects with a bare bottom. There were some squeaks and yelps coming from the spanked girl.

When we came downstairs afterwards, we found that, while all of this was going on in a room just above the front door, we’d been left a leaflet by the Conservative Party.

How very, very appropriate. And what a shame that a canvasser didn’t actually knock on the door: we could have demonstrated that the conservative values are alive and well in the region.

In a manner of speaking.

I was fascinated by an old clipping from the New York Times that was posted across at the excellent “Behind the Barred Window”. It concerned a damning investigation in 1914 into conditions at the State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills. Conditions were described as “better suited to one’s idea of a mediaeval dungeon than to a disciplinary building in a modern reformatory for women in the great state of New York”.

The Superintendent dismissed the allegations of unreasonable punishments. The report’s author, she said, “seems to have made the great mistake of believing in full every story told him by the six or seven worst girls in the place. They might be expected to lie to him, and he should not have taken their unsupported word.”

She added, “Although we have many difficult cases in the reformatory, and at times have to employ stern measures, we have never resorted to cruelty of any kind.” Until, perhaps, the media attention had died down and the ’six or seven’ girls in question could be dealt with – for the very soundest of birchings must surely have followed.

… your business meetings in Amsterdam finish early, you go for a walk, and all the sex shops seem *so* tame! Not a decent implement in sight.

I had to compensate with a visit to the Torture Museum (“The procedures of Inquisition, shameful and corporal punishments… Learn the painful truth…”). That too was rather dull – not a whip in sight, although some of the illustrations were rather nice. Sorry, rather shocking and scary.

But it was the coffee shop that I passed later which sparked interesting ideas – ‘coffee’ in this context being more (legal) cannabis than capuccino. I pictured a schoolmaster in the hotel reception, in a state of some agitation – his ‘lights out’ room-by-room roll call having determined that two of the young ladies in his care had failed to return that evening.

They’d show up before long – just as he was debating whether to call the police to report them missing. The pair would be skimpily-dressed, overly-made-up, unstable on their feet and incredibly giggly.

“We’ve been for a *coffee*, sir. A legal one.” (Snigger). “We forgot the time. But you’re nice, sir, and we knew you wouldn’t mind…”

But mind he did, and their demeanour back at school a few days later would be rather different as they stood before the Headmaster. Six strokes each on the bare would preceed a one-week suspension; they’d touch their toes side-by-side for their caning, before being sent to pack and await the arrival of their respective fathers to take them to their homes…

The London Lite yesterday had a review of a TV programme in which the star of a sitcom Waterloo Road (which set in a school) goes to a real school and attempts to teach.

I think it’s pretty lucky that the woman in question didn’t play the role of a teacher in Grange Hill instead – right about at the time when they had a caning scene in it. Then she would have gone into the classroom armed with all the tools and the experience to sustain her through the day.

She’d certainly need it in any classroom with me in it…