The Spanking Writers

So, today’s my birthday, and I’ve already got a very sore bottom as a result. That’s how it works. Birthday = presents, of course, but also, birthday = spanking, and plenty of it.

But today’s soreness doesn’t begin to compare to the state my bottom was in the weekend before we left for Japan, when I returned home after sleeping over at some friends’ house – and discovered that Abel had gathered up a huge crowd of our friends for a surprise birthday party for me.

Normally I don’t play much at parties, as I’m too shy to ask, but this was actually all about me, so there was no need to be modest. I bravely decided to ask every top in attendance for a birthday spanking.

My goodness, what a fool I was to think that a birthday spanking necessarily consists of the number of strokes corresponding to one’s age, plus one for luck. Granted, a couple of people stuck to the 30 + 1 formula, but some very nicely warmed me up with 5 different implements before the count even started, and some decided to dispense with the counting altogether, walloping me for what it was worth. Seven “birthday spanking” sessions later, plus two spankings for general naughtiness, I was so sore that pulling my knickers up was almost unbearably painful. Plus, it was getting late. My ambitious plan had proved to be quite unrealistic in the end.

I used to think that birthday spankings were boring, as there was no psychological reason behind them. Unless I was spanked for something in particular, there was, to me, no point in doing it. I get it now, though: the reason for a birthday spanking is that you’re with friends who care for you, and want you to have a good time. Even when “a good time” means being so sore that you wake yourself up turning over in your sleep.

Birthday spankings are good. Yes.

* It was a school-themed event in everything including the massive birthday cake, which was decorated with a book of school rules, a teacher’s mortarboard and a pencil that may have been a cane. I was in heaven.

An item on the news about the lack of male teachers in schools these days, and how it’s a bad thing. I imagine a predominantly female common room watching the news during the lunch break, commenting to each other that an extra man or two would certainly be nice.

“We could delegate some of the canings,” a young teacher straight out of college would say wistfully. “In my old school the housemaster did all the caning, and he was fearsome.” She’d blush as she realises what she has just admitted to.

“My dear,” a slightly older teacher would say with a smile. “You don’t need a man to deliver a fearsome caning. You just need skill and confidence, and that comes with practice and a little bit of inspiration. Come see me at four. I will show you something.”

The young teacher would walk to her older friend’s classroom after the final bell, making her way through a throng of departing girls, feeling not unlike she used to when she walked to her housemaster’s study after the end of lessons. She would stop just before knocking on the door, and remember that she can just enter unasked.

“Here you are,” her older friend would say. “Take a seat. My miscreat won’t be long if she knows what’s good for her.”

Sure enough, a fifth-form girl would appear soon, her presence announced by a timid knock. She would look too nervous, too preoccupied to ask about the presence of another teacher in the room.

A short discussion of her misdeed would follow: passing notes in class, after having been warned about it before. She would apologise with tears in her voice, clearly knowing what’s coming.

“I’m glad to hear you are sorry,” her teacher would say. “But this time, I’m afraid, I need to impress upon you the need to focus in class, and not to distract other girls with your silliness. Raise your skirt, please, and bend over my desk.”

The young teacher would watch the girl reluctantly bend forward with her knickers tightly stretched over her bottom. The older teacher would pick up a cane that every classroom has hanging on a nail by the board and walk back and forth behind the girl, only the clicking of her heels breaking the silence. Finally she would take her position and tap the cane lightly on the girl’s behind, taking aim, before bringing the instrument up in a graceful arc and whipping it down with a crack.

The younger teacher would take mental notes throughout this intense display. She would mark her friend’s complete composure, her unhurried manner, the wait between the strokes, the comforting hand on the small of the girl’s back when the sobbing became desperate. She would try to remember the short lecture that came after the girl, disheveled and undone, was allowed to rise, followed by a kindly offer of a hug, gratefully accepted. An edifying spectacle indeed, she would think, comparing it to her own stumbling attempts to cane some of her unruly pupils.

After the teachers are alone again, the older one would smile to the younger friend. “There you are,” she would say. “It’s all that, and a bit of practice on the cushions. No need to hand it over to men, see?”

“Thank you,” the young woman would say. “I see now.”

And she would. For even though she was only a spectator, she would have to admit that her pulse was beating just as fast as it used to after the encounter with her housemaster. She would go home, and think about authority, and practise on cushions.

Tokyo’s Akihabara neighbourhood is famous as the city’s main area for two things – cheap electronics, and “nerd” culture (otaku). It was the latter that drew us there, curious to browse the stores selling cosplay, manga and anime goods. Actually, they were something of a disappointment – although it is quite amazing what naughty things the Japanese can get their cartoon characters to do.

But one facet of the otaku culture that did look fascinating was the maid cafe. The streets are lined with the cutest young ladies dressed demurely in maid outfits, trying to persuade you to visit their establishments. They’re all entirely above board: said servants greet you formally (apparently, “Welcome home, master,” is a typical welcome), then deferentially serve you tea, coffee and cake.

The latest trend is for diversification: the uniformed maids are being increasingly replaced by pretend-schoolgirls. (Presumably they’re on punishment detention, forced to serve refreshments in the staff common room)? Much as the idea appealed, I rather doubted that customers would be permitted to deal with the waitresses in quite the way I had in mind, so we wandered off to find a Starbucks. Oh, and a sex shop selling spanking DVDs…

Cybill Shepherd recalls some of her childhood spankings in her memoir, “Cybill Disobedience”. She and her sister Terry shared a bed, and at one point had a bit of a fight there:

When my father saw my bruised shins and red-rimmed eyes, he made Terry bend over, hands to ankles, and walloped her with his belt. She incurred a similar punishment every time she chased me around the house and attacked me, which was often because I regularly provoked her, awfully dumb since she was older, bigger, stronger, and faster.

I hid over a floor furnace outside the den every time she was punished, talking to my plastic horses while my sister yelped, determined to avoid such punishment myself. I, Miss Perfect, rarely got whipped. My most egregious sins were repeatedly scribbling in crayon on the living room wall and taunting my brother to bite me, then telling on him when he did. The spankings came to an end when I stopped crying.

That’s funny… when I don’t make any noise, they usually just spank harder. What’s wrong with those tops?

By a stroke of fortuitous timing, our visit to the Tokyo National Museum coincided with the opening of a major new exhibition showing – for the first time in public – the best artworks from the Japanese imperial collection.

It was crowded, as you would expect, not least with parties of schoolgirls obediently studying the exhibits. Except, we surmised, for two of their number who would have sneaked outside and hidden away for a smoke – relying on their friends to let them copy the answers to the quiz they were supposed to have filled out whilst touring the exhibition halls.

Only, unusually, their teacher would ask for the completed forms when the girls came to board the bus, rather than at the end of the journey. The two young ladies would present blank sheets; the schoolmaster would scent the aroma of tobacco; a search of their blazer pockets would reveal the half-smoked packet of cigarettes.

They’d be sent back inside to do the work, naturally – whilst their classmates sat (increasingly bored, in forced silence) on the coach, awaiting their return. And, needless to say, when they did eventually get back, by now very late, to the high school grounds, they’d be marched in front of the Headmaster to explain what had transpired, and hence to be caned.

Browsing the library shelves, I found a wonderfully named book aimed at teachers: “Getting the Buggers to Behave”.

Lovely title!

It’s a series, apparently. There’re also books “Getting the Buggers” to write, be creative and stuff like that. The chapters are named along the similar lines.

I can just imagine the missing chapters: “Putting the buggers in the corner”, “Giving the buggers lines”, “Thrashing the living dayligts out of the buggers”…

If I saw something like that on a teacher’s bookshelf, I’d probably think twice about misbehaving.

One of the top Japanese stationery shops seemed to be rather our sort of place:

I just wonder what each of the four characters means. ‘Canes, cuffs, soap, straps’?

Later, we saw a lass wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘The cool and the evil are inseparable’. I rather thought we might adopt it as a slogan for our blog. (Certainly it’s more apt than the poster we saw for an environmental campaign, rather remarkably named the ‘Fuku-Fuku Project’)!

Even  that was surpassed this morning at breakfast. See, their designers do have a habit of plastering clothing with random English phrases – “Dick Brewer”, for example. But the gentleman with his family this morning seemed quite oblivious to the true meaning of his T-shirt phrase, which simply stated: “SODOMY”.

After I first started playing spanking scenes (they were, for the most part virtual scenes), it took me a while to get drawn to father/daughter scenes. I guess it was because I was young and living at home, with my actual father. Although I’ve never called my father “daddy”, play-acting with somebody else as my daddy seemed treacherous. Uncles worked, guardians worked, fathers – not so much.

I’m not sure what changed, because several months later a switch flipped in my brain, and allowed me to see that if in a scene I was not playing myself, but being instead some other girl, then that girl’s father wasn’t a stand-in for my father. So I wasn’t betraying my dad, or wishing he was somehow different, or erasing him, or any of that stuff guilt-thinking made me wonder about. I was playing out a fantasy relationship.

I wonder how it is for others: if Daddy/daughter play is your thing, have you ever felt guilty towards your own father? Or maybe your real father wasn’t that great to start with, and in role-play you are, in fact, replacing him with a better fantasy version?

If it isn’t your thing, does your relationship with your father play any part in your reasoning?

Just wondering.

Saturday, our first full day in Japan – and our hotel’s club lounge thankfully has wi-fi. We decided to take an easy introduction to Tokyo, so wandered into Ginza, one of the main shopping areas, where Haron’s stationery fetish was duly indulged.

We spied a fair few delightfully-uniformed schoolgirls as we wandered. My darling wife expressed sympathy with their plight: “It’s mean that they have to go to school on a Saturday.” Needless to say, I jumped to the more obvious conclusion – that these were the girls sentenced to a Saturday detention.

They’d start the day in a queue outside a classroom; the duty master would take in the first girl, bend her over the teacher’s table at the front of the room, cane her soundly, and then send her to sit at one of the wooden desks to start writing an essay of atonement for whatever transgression had led to her punishment. The next offenders would be called in one by one, and each dealt with in a similar manner.

As lunchtime drew near, the girls would be made to come to the front of the class in turn to read their apologies aloud. Should the master be less than satisfied with the length, content or tone of their work, a further, harder caning would follow, this time on the bare.

Reading a biography of John Betjeman, I found out that he described his school whackings in poetry later in life:

Betjeman was happy at the Dragon [School], in spite of the fact that… it practised corporal punishment. “Summoned by Bells” recalls one of the masters, Gerard Haynes… thwacking Betjeman with a slipper for talking after lights out in the dormitory,

“I like the way you took that beating, John.
Reckon yourself henceforth a gentleman.”

I wonder why more poets didn’t leave us autobiographical spanking verse…