The Spanking Writers

My team at work has been doing some work lately on contracts for our business. We’ve hired a posh lawyer to draft the agreements, and we’ve been merrily (?!) ploughing through them, checking clause-by-clause.

One particular topic provoked a little debate, so a colleague decided to Google the issue concerned. And, lo and behold, he discovered that the very same document that we were reviewing (prepared for us at considerable cost by the lawyer) was freely available on the web.

Needless to say, complaints will follow. Now, the “File Properties” in Microsoft Word shows that the document was created by a lady called Patricia. And, as my wife pointed out, young Trish might end up in rather serious trouble. As the most junior lawyer on the books, newly-qualified, she’d have been rushed off her feet. Rather than miss a deadline for drafting our document, she’d resorted to the quickest means she knew and copied it from the internet.

The matter will be dealt by her superiors with under “Any Other Business” at next week’s partners meeting. She’ll be called in and lectured on her conduct, before being punished: knickers down, skirt lifted, bent over the boardroom table whilst the senior partner administers the twelve strokes that would serve as her final warning.

I have the weirdest dreams sometimes…

On Tuesday afternoon, for example, I’d popped into the cafe in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. That night I returned in my sleep – and who should saunter in but the Archbishop of Canterbury and his cronies, leading a group of cloaked girls and lining them up in front of the assembled gathering.

The first young woman was called forward and made to remove her cloak, revealing her nudity. At the Archbishop’s order, one of his men stepped forward and examined the girl thoroughly before ordering her to bend over with her hands on the seat of a chair and her legs apart. Six strokes of the cane followed, before she was sent back into line to watch the next girl’s ordeal.

Punishment? Initiation? A trifling diversion for the clerics’ pleasure (“it’s our building and we can do what we like in it”?)? I have no idea, but I can’t believe that I have managed to mentally corrupt one of London’s loveliest and holiest buildings!

On the breakfast show yesterday the presenters enthisiastically welcomed their guests: Gary Barlow and a young lady introduced as a protegee of his. A fun conversation followed:

Presenter 1: “Your protegee, is she?”

Gary: “Yes.”

Presenter 1: “So, what do you do, protect her?”

Presenter 2: “Oh, that’s a wrong word, isn’t it?”

Gary: “No, protect is wrong, I…”

Presenter 1: “Mentor! That’s it, mentor!”

Naturally, Abel and I thought that it should have gone along a different line:

“So what do you do?”

“Oh, I provide encouragement and discipline when necessary. There are times when she needs nothing but a gentle scolding, but I find that a good spanking is often an excellent mentoring tool.

Well, that was a conference call with a difference. The guy on the other end of the line was an engineer, demonstrating some clever new-fangled software that helped to work out what products they could sell. Being technically inept, the combination of engineering and software was sending me to sleep – although I confess to having a second browser open, and looking at (ahem) some more interesting material online whilst the demo was underway.

Until, that is, he said, “So to follow the example, what sort of striping would you like?”

Red, it seemed.

“And what about the bottoms?”

I nearly fell of my chair, especially when he answered, “We’ll have them from left to right.”

And so he produced his final screen, showing the costs – for “Red striping. Bottom mounted from left to right.”

Later in the discussion, comments included, “These days people want more than one position”, followed by a product called the “SWING 2000 (low branding)”. I was quite glad about the branding, frankly, it not really being my kink.

Do you think he might have been one of us – or just an incredibly naive vanilla type, trusting that none of his audience would be as perverted as me?!

I tidied my bedside table yesterday, and found a clipping from a magazine I don’t recognise (some travel thing). It had the following letter from a reader:

Corporal punishment

Thanks for the huge Spa Special in the February issue. A friend of mine has been looking great… for months since a trip to a no-nonsense place in Switzerland, so I was very interested in the ‘Boot Camp’ section. And after reading about the strapping ex-Marines who run courses in Scotland, I’ve decided it’s time I booked myself in for some punishing healthy activity.

I wish I had the article the letter is referring to. Strapping in a Scottish boot camp sounds like a great treat. And a very healthy activity indeed.

P.S. I’m back. Hello. And thank you to Abel for holding the fort while I was abroad!

See, I think most noblemen let their subjects off to easily. What’s all this paying of tithes and droit de seigneur, if there’s no good whippings going on?

The duke in a recent dream had a better scheme, whereby the folks of his fiefdom were forced to demonstrate their loyalty and submission to him in a traditional ceremony once a year. Each village was required to send him one of their maidens; once the girls were gathered in the great hall, they’d be stripped and led to the field below the castle walls. There, they’d be tied to posts – and each would be soundly flogged in turn.

A great banquet would follow for all of those present, albeit the girls who’d just been whipped rarely had much appetite for the feast.

Regular readers will know that M/M punishments really aren’t my thing (much as Haron finds them fascinating). That said, I can easily corrupt tales of discipline in boys’ public schools, so that schoolgirls are the ones on the receiving end.

One such example comes from “Adventues of a language traveller”, the 1998 autobiography of John Haycraft. The author describes his 1930s education, when “terror was made manifest by corporal punishment, regularly administered by the headmaster on bare bottoms.”

In his study, he had a range of instruments in order of pain: the simple strap, the razor strop, and the ‘little swish’, a short ivory cane, all used with the culprit lying bare-bottomed across the man’s knees.

More outrageous offences, such as stealing apples from the orchard at night, or trying to go home in the boot of your parents’ car, were punished with the dreaded ‘big swish’, the birch, a longer cane which he used standing up to get the necessary leverage. The number of strokes depended on the severity of the offence: two with the strap for leaving a towel in the swimming-pool, up to twelve with the big swish for exceptional offences.

Every Monday, which we called Black Monday, punishment was ritualised especially grimly. Those who had worked poorly the previous week were dealt with during Monday evening prep. Tension mounted as evening came, particularly for people who felt their week’s work had not gone well, everyone listening intently.

First came the footsteps. A classroom door opened, a voice was heard. The door closed, and two pairs of footsteps disappeared down the corridor to the headmaster’s study. The dragon had carried off its first victim.

Within minutes the footsteps came again – the wretched boy summoning the next miscreant. Sometimes several went from one class. Other rooms would be missed out altogether, and through them a great surge of relief would roll.

See: the only boy involved was the prefect calling the girls to their fate. Quite to my taste – and, I suspect, to that of most of our readers.

Sometimes inspiration for blog entries strikes at the most unlikely times. I stayed in a delightfully quirky little hotel recently which provided (ahem) bathroom reading for its guests. The volume so thoughtfully provided for gentlemen to consider was a 1955 ‘Champion’ annual for boys.

Of course, there were bound to be school stories. And where 1950s schools are concerned, corporal punishment was inevitably going to feature. It did, in one delicious paragraph featuring a Housemaster and one of his pupils:

“Snook, go to my study and fetch my cane from my desk, said Mr Grimm in icy tones. “I shall want a word with you after the others have gone.”

Amazing how an M/m story can so easily be translated to M/f in my pervy imagination! Singling out one girl from the group. Sending her to fetch the cane. Keeping her back to punish her. Oh, how evocative!

A young lady called Kimberly posted a sad little tale on a discussion board a few years back:

I attended a public middle school in South Carolina that allowed corporal punishment. One time I got a paddling (one swing) when the teacher thought I had done something that I didn’t actually do. When she realized her mistake, she informed me, in front of the class, that she was sorry and I now had a “get out of jail free” card for the next infraction I committed.

I was shy and quiet and never got to use it. But the other kids thought I was cool because I could go break a rule without being paddled. I remember them shouting suggestions out to me in class. Pretty funny, now that I think about it.

I wonder what on earth girls in some of the school role plays we’ve enjoyed would get up to if they knew they had immunity from the next whacking. Then again, the very idea that a master at such an event might waive a future punishment is much too far-fetched to merit serious consideration… Cruel, aren’t we?

Well, that was an interesting evening…

See, Cath and I headed out yesterday afternoon to a local antique shop yesterday, and found that it stocked a rather nice selection of riding crops. I studied a few and made my selection, at which point the elderly gentleman chatting to the owner turned to me and said, “You know what that is, don’t you? A bull’s manhood.”

For, indeed, I had managed to buy a prized artefact – a pizzle. I defer to the authoritative “Agony & Ecstacy” for more details:

The pizzle is a whip made from a bull’s penis (which is also called a pizzle)… The penis is cleaned, salted and dried. By stretching and sometimes twisting during this process, it becomes a highly flexible rod-like whip of 3ft overall length (actually, it can be stretched much longer, becoming increasingly thin).

They describe it as a’ severe’ implement, noting that the eighteenth-century German equivalent, the Ochenziemer, “was used as a harsher alternative to the birch rod for judiciary punishments”:

If mentioned in the sentence, the lashes were given during the culprit stay at the prison. The men usually got it on the bare back, tied to a post, the women on mostly on clothed buttocks, frequently covered only with thin wet pants but sometimes also on the bare, while lying on a long low bench which had restraining mechanisms for holding the head and feet.

But even when a flogging was not included in the judge’s sentence, the pizzle (or a birch rod) was used for the customary “welcome” and “farewell” floggings given to all prisoners, male and female, just after entering and just before leaving the prison. Those floggings were usually given in front of people, both women and men, that went to prison just for watching (and enjoying) the punishments.

Like this, for example:

So what of my newly-acquired penis? Well, as night fell I became the master of the local hunt. Young Catherine was a maid in the house of one of the other huntsmen; she’d managed to get in the way of the hunt that afternoon, and a flogging was called for – for endangering herself, the riders and the horses.

The master took out his most feared implement – the pizzle – and bade her bare herself and bend over. By her eighteenth and final stroke, the sorry young lady was pleading for forgiveness… as was my lovely new possession, the leather tip of which managed to fly off during the flogging – as shown in the photo below (with a copy of our book, to give you an idea of scale):

I asked young Catherine, once the maid had been dismissed, to tell me how the pizzle compared to other riding crops she’d experienced. “I don’t think I ever have,” she foolishly replied, so a selection of five were duly brought out and tested in turn. After four strokes of each, the dressage whip was voted the winner, if you’re wondering!