The latest addition to my movie library features two cute models being thrashed in turn by a spanking machine. They’re tied to the whipping frame; the device is positioned behind them, to the side. At the touch of a computerised button, the machine whips the cane forwards, horizontally, across its target, then back into place ready for the next stroke. The machine adjusts the height of the strokes, little by little, leaving perfect parallel stripes across the girls’ behinds.

Haron hates the lack of a human touch, whereas I found the very dehumanising of the process to be quite fascinating. So much, so, in fact, that I’ve been picturing wider applications for the machines.

See, flogging one girl at a time seems an awfully inefficient use of prison officers’ time. I’d propose a large room, equipped to punish ten or more offenders in a session. The young women, wearing prison uniforms, would be escorted in by the officers, and made to line up. Their names would be read out in turn – once a girl was called, she’d be expected to step forward and strip, before being sent to stand behind her designated punishment station.

Once all of the girls were in place, the officers would tour the room, strapping them tightly into position. The machines would be positioned carefully, and checked. For the girls, the lengthy wait – as their fellow inmates were readied for punishment – would be filled with trepidation.

The officers would then retire to the control panel at the back of the room, and would enter details of each girl’s name and offence. The computer would check whether an offender had been flogged before. And then it would calcuate the number of strokes due in each case. Once all of the sentences had been worked out, the senior officer would type in the instruction to commence the punishments, and the machines would spring into life.

Two or three girls might feel the cut of the cane at precisely the same moment, but the strokes would be unpredictable in pattern. Caned immediately before one’s nearest neighbour, then moments after, then before, then at the same time.   Twenty seconds apart,   then forty, then ten, then three in immediate succesion. Severity varying, from very hard to the machine’s hardest.

The near-silent workings of the mechanisms – amidst the sounds of sobbing – would mean that a girl would have no way of knowing whether a particular swish would be coming her way, until the very moment of impact. And whilst she’d have a vague idea of the likely number of strokes (ten to twenty being par for the course), a girl would have no idea of the total tally calculated by the computer – and hence, after the first ten, of whether any given stroke had been her last.

(Oh. I think I’ve just scared Haron).