“Where this might be seen to get a little grey is the issue of whether a vanilla model (e.g. one “doing it for the money”, rather than as someone who’s kinky and curious / keen to participate for that reason) can indeed fully consent to what’s going to happen, given she presumably has no idea what a flogging will actually feel like in practice. She might consent to the theoretical idea of being whacked, but if the reality is very different (worse) than she’d anticipated (or been led to anticipate), had she genuinely ‘consented’? I think so – all participants were, after all, responsible adults.”

I think so, too. Also, I find it doubtful that the difference between “vanilla” and “kinky” is as clear-cut here as some people might make it out to be.

Can *anyone* give truly informed consent to a very severe, Mood Pictures-style caning when they haven’t had one before? Sure, you might have had lighter thrashings before, so you will probably have a better idea of what it might be like than the vanilla girl. But do you really know what it is like, can you really give “fully” informed consent, whatever that is? I don’t think so.

The point was raised by my girlfiriend Kaelah when I talked to her the other day. You may have read that we did a very severe caning scene a few weeks ago, Mood Pictures-style, because she wanted to know what that is like. And Kaelah’s judgment is that, even when you’ve been caned before – even when you’ve been caned *fairly severely* before! -, you don’t really have an idea of what it is like.

No matter what previous experiences you have or how hard you try to inform yourself (theoretically) beforehand, consent will always be “blind”, to a certain degree, when it is something you’ve never done before. It may be more blind in the case of vanilla models doing spanking films than in the case of kinky models. But I don’t think that the difference is nearly as big as one might think.

It’s an interesting question – what is “informed” consent, exactly? How informed does it have to be to be “informed enough”?

Let’s hope that the allegations against Mood prove to be unfounded, both for the sake of the Mood people and to confirm that none of their actors had been put through unacceptable experiences.

Legality

For me, personally, the legality of the Mood / EP videos was never in question – otherwise, I would not have worked with them. After all, they had been in business for the past five years (six years by now), they had shot dozens of videos with literally hundreds of models, and they were doing it all relatively openly (advertising in newspapers, and so on). My thinking was, if there was something illegal about what Mood was doing, wouldn’t they have gotten in trouble with the law a long time ago already? Moreover, there were other BDSM video producers in Hungary who also filmed canings with vivid marks. They didn’t seem to have any legal troubles, either.

Add to this the fact that the Mood / EP videos were not just available as downloads on the internet, but also in the local, “mainstream” sex shops here in Germany, like Beate Uhse. In light of all this, I never even considered the possibility that the videos might be illegal in Hungary (there is, after all, such a thing as EU-wide police cooperation, and the Germans, especially, are big proponents of this).

Well, in the upcoming court case, one will undoubtedly see what the local Hungarian law has to say about it. I’m not a legal expert, but if other jurisdictions are anything to go by, then there is probably a pretty big grey area when it comes to the exact level of injury that one can legally consent to…

Consent

At the shoot I attended, Mood didn’t use any coded safewords (like “Stop it, I beg you, my Lord!”), and Pedro explained to me that they normally don’t. However, they did stop the thrashings when a girl asked for it “out of character” (with one possible exception, see below), or whenever they themselves (the nurse present at the shoot) thought that a break should be given.

In practice, there were between one and three breaks per scene. Rita Goord, the first of two girls whom I caned, was the only one of all who did her scene without a single break (she had done several other videos with Mood before). On the other end of the spectrum, there was a girl who quit after only four or five strokes. There was no attempt to persuade her to continue, they simply untied her and she went home.

There was one single episode during the shoot that I consider “borderline”. It happened at the end of my second caning scene, with Tammy Lange. Tammy had called for two interruptions during the scene, and of course, they were given. We continued when she said she was ready. Then, shortly before the end of the scheduled 50 strokes (around 44 or 45), she was banging her hands on the wooden platform and yelling “Stop, stop, stop…”

I hesitated. She didn’t say anything more – during the previous breaks, she had immediately started a conversation with the director. This time, she was just silent. She didn’t seem hysterical, neither did she seem catatonic. I wasn’t sure if she *really* wanted to stop the scene, again.

I looked over to the assistant director, who was sort of directing me, like he did with all the tops. He gave Tammy a hand siginal, five fingers, as in “only a handful more to go”. I believe she saw it, and again, she didn’t say anything. Then, he signalled to me that I should go on, and I did. I gave her the last five or six strokes, whatever number it was that remained.

Tammy was fine afterwards. Actually, she did another Mood video a month or two later. As for me, I didn’t give the episode much thought at the time – I was happy to see that she was okay when the scene was over, and I was still high from shooting my first professional CP film, anyway. I gave the episode a single-sentence description in my behind-the-scenes report on the blog that probably sounds way more dramatic than it was.

Still, I came to the view later that I had made the wrong decision. It was a moment where I wasn’t sure about the consent, and as brief as it was, and as close as it was towards the end of the scene, I should still have “overruled” the assistant director out of my own initiative and stopped the scene. I should have asked Tammy, “Do you want to go on?” (I am positive that the answer would have been “Yes”), and only then would we have gone on. That way, everything would have been in the green.

As it was, the episode was borderline, and today, I would do it differently. I came to this view long before I heard about the current accusations against Mood, and obviously, I had to think about that moment with Tammy again in recent days.

The worst that I could imagine to have happened at that recent EP shoot would be something along those lines, something “borderline”. However, this is not what the article claims. The article claims that a producer took over the scene and thrashed the girl after the woman orignally thrashing her was done, and that the girl’s pleas to stop were being ignored repeatedly and for an extended period of time. That, on the other hand, I have a haed time imagining.

Also, I just received another email from Pedro today, who claims that the girl who made the accusations was not even tied down for the last 10 minutes of her scene. If this is true, it does of course raise big questions about the truth of the accusations.

Responsible Conduct

While Mood / EP were exemplary in certain areas, like medical aftercare, and while they certainly did care about safety, the one area where they were always much too negligent in my opinion was the shoddy accuracy of some of their tops. I was critical of that in my behind-the-scenes report (if you read my remarks about Lady Jessica), I was critical of it in movie reviews, and God knows I raised the subject more than once in private conversations with Pedro.

Prior to January 27th, if I had expected Mood to get into any trouble, I would have expected it to be about an accident, a stray cane or whip stroke that seriously injures a girl. The accusations as they are made in the newspaper, on the other hand, surprise me, and I have a hard time believing them in this form.

Anyway, thank you again for your interesting post. I will continue to cover the Mood story on my blog, as I’m sure you will.

Description of Services–The Production Company hereby engages the Stunt Performer to render services as Haron in conjunction with the motion picture entitled “Invasion of The Spanking Writers” (the “Picture”) and to perform such activities as required by the Production Company and further described in the Shooting Script for the Picture. The Stunt Performer accepts such engagement upon the terms herein specified. Terms…

If you want the full example e-mail me.

R