The Spanking Writers

It’s here at last: the most-anticipated book of the year for spanking enthusiasts! We’re very proud to announce the launch of “The Spanking Collection”, an anthology of new and exclusive short stories from a hand-picked selection of twenty of our favourite kinky writers.

As importantly as getting to read some truly great writing, by buying your copy you’ll be supporting an excellent cause, since all profits from the book will be donated to cancer research charities.

You can buy copies online as follows:

• Printed copy, in paperback
• Kindle, via Amazon in the US, UK and Germany
• Several other ebook formats, such as Epub, PDF, RTF, HTML or plain text, working on many ebook reading devices – Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo or whatever you’ve got that reads these formats.

(The paperback version will also be available from Amazon later in the year).

We’re hugely grateful to the authors who’ve contributed their pieces free to this charity collection. The stories are listed below, in the order in which they appear in the book:

The Scholarship Girl – Abel Jenkins

Slipping Up – Emma Jane

Keelin and Shayla – Faye Glass

Watching Xanadu – Paul Bailey

Staff Handbook: Chapter 5 – Discipline and Punishments – Henry Higgins

Penitence and Mercy – Graham Grey

The Punishment Room – Martha Linton

Suite Two – Bonnie

Finished – Rebecca Williams

The Library – Casey Morgan

What the Butler Saw – Jessica Davies

Knock-knock-knockin’ on Mr Batts’ Door – Zille Defeu

That Charming, Disarming Man – William & Catherine

The Royal Wedding – Pandora Blake

Trouble in Telesales – Domino

Heatstroke – Penny Docherty

Arlington Girls’ Reformatory – Rayne

Watching – Discerning Dom

Wifehouse – Serenity Everton

Honour Among Fools – Haron

 

The book also features an introduction by Eliane, as well as a specially-painted front cover by Catherine Thomas showing Abel slippering Emma Jane:

We hope you’ll buy the book and love it; we’re really proud of it, and hope that it’ll raise a good sum for an important charity too.

Abel shares some fantasies sparked by our short holiday – maids and butlers, fathers and daughters, prefects and fags, oh yes.

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If there’s one major weakness in my spanking technique,  I reckon it’s to do with warm-ups* – or, more particularly, the lack of them in many of the scenes I play.

I get the need for a good warm-up, of course, from the girl’s perspective – and that it’s in a good top’s interest too, allowing, perhaps, the scene to continue longer and (where appropriate) with greater intensity than if whackings are administered cold.

But here’s the thing. When it comes to school scenes, the thought of a headmaster laying his hands on a girl – rather than using a cane, tawse or slipper – doesn’t ring true for me. In a judicial scene, a hand spanking hardly feels commensurate with the caning or birching to follow. When the master of the house punishes a maid, putting her over his knees suggests inappropriate physical intimacy. In other settings, it just feels… well, indecisive: surely a disciplinarian should select his implement of choice, and get on for it, rather than dithering (“hey, let’s start with a hand spanking, then I thought we could move on to the strap too for variety…”).

Damned authenticity fetish, see? Of course that does leave many delightful scenes where a warming hand spanking is entirely appropriate; it fits in perfectly when out of character too – at parties for example, when just playing for sheer fun without a scenario or roles. But in the ones that are probably closest to my core kink? I struggle.

Ideas, tips? Do other tops feel the same – and how do you overcome it? And from those of you on the receiving end: any thoughts on how a good warm-up can best be integrated seamlessly into a scene where it may not fit totally naturally?

* others who’ve played with me may wish to come up with their own lists, but that’s not really the point of the post!

Oh, this is just lovely. Some kind soul, while compiling a history of Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe has seen fit to include a chapter on “RGS and corporal punishment”.

It includes such lovely things as this anecdote:

In one notable incident that must have been in the early 1940′s [the Headmaster] was part of the team in a Staff v. Old Boys match. The pupils were obliged to spectate. It was a wet day and, as fate would have it, Mr Tucker came down face first in a huge patch of mud. The boys’ reaction was predictable. They howled with delight and no doubt some less than sympathetic comments were made. Mr Tucker’s failed to see the funny side and the next day he caned the whole school.

This reminds me of a boys v. staff basketball match at my old school, during the course of which the universally hated maths teacher took a ball in the eye, and was sporting the most fantastic black eye for the next week. There wasn’t much sympathy for him, either. No universal canings, though.

Back to High Wycombe, though, where prefects also had the right to use corporal punishment, which they recorded in a book later found behind a cupboard. There, the senior prefect had written:

Redgate, Justice and Bolton were brought in by Ives for ragging on their way home from school as they were going down Amersham Hill. This was considered serious as it would bring discredit upon the school. The worst offenders, Bolton and Redgate were given three strokes while Justice received two.

Mmm, it reads like poetry. What’s “ragging”, though?

A few months back, I decided to become more open with vanilla friends and colleagues about the poly side of my life (bizarrely, shortly before various relationship changes which meant that perhaps I’d have been better off keeping quiet!). The conversations provoked a degree of curiosity, a fair few questions – and a remarkable amount of understanding and support. “So, you can be in love with more than one person – and everyone’s happy with it?” seems actually, strangely, to be something that even the most straight-laced types can get their minds around.

But what about spanking? I make no secret of the fact that I write ‘for adults’: ‘erotica’, even. Some folks even know it’s about ‘fetish’. But more than that I won’t say – I won’t mention corporal punishment specifically, and most certainly won’t discuss real-life spanking play. (I’ve actually only done that with one vanilla friend, ever. Although this isn’t her kink, she may even be reading this right now).

It’s not as if being “outed” as a spanko would imperil my vanilla existence: I don’t work in a sensitive job, for example. Yet I suspect any discussion would provoke shock and outrage: “So, you beat women, then?”  What I do as a top is so beyond socially acceptable vanilla norms, that I doubt they’d listen along sympathetically as far as the obvious response (“Only if they want me to!”).

How do others handle this? And is it the case that it’s easier for someone who’s a bottom to “out” themselves than a top: is “I’m into pain” less of a shock to the vanilla system and more socially acceptable than “I’m into hurting others”? I’m not sure it is – but I’m curious to know what others think.

My trawl of the internet for spanking references has turned up something quite quaint an weird: a cutting from “The Meriden Daily Journal” from Nov 26, 1940, headed “Mrs Catt would use spanking machine on dreamers of empires”.

Mrs. Catt was an 81-year-old veteran suffragist who was addressing the opening of Women’s Centennial Congress. The gist of her message was that war was bad.

Here’s what she said (this is during World War II, right?):

Perhaps what we most need is an international mothers’ Gestapo whose business it will be to hunt out the world empire dreamers in infancy and use a spanking machine on them.

Excuse me, she wants to organise what?

…I think language has changed since then, just a bit.

Last, and very certainly not least, in our annual collection of fascinating writing from elsewhere in the spankosphere, comes a wonderful discussion from Not an Odalisque, entitled “Consent, Non-consent, and “Get The Hell Away From Me!”".

Kinky people tend to have, or say they have, a profound belief in consent. When playing with fire (hard limit, no thank you), a nuanced understanding of how people agree to things is reassuring. Exploitation and coercion occur even when people seem to enthusiastically say “yes,” but consent’s a good starting point. When you’re seeing people tied up and beaten, and feeling reluctant to intervene, that’s valuable.

As a group, we’ve generally agreed that consent is an ongoing action, and might cease at any time. This destroys the, “she was wearing a miniskirt,” defence, but raises some difficulties. You can’t withdraw your consent to be on an aeroplane mid-flight, but you can mid-kiss or mid-beating. In the fetish community practices like safewords are encouraged so that withdrawal can be communicated. I know a man who likes to gag people, but always gives them little cymbals to drop if they want the scene to end. Then, what if you enjoy being pushed beyond the point at which you seriously say, “no”?*

At this point you’re sure to encounter a self-appointed member of the consent police. He admonishes those who dare to play without safewords (I find them useless, because by the time I need to use them I’m too far gone to speak), and reprimands those who don’t hide their kink well enough, for involving unconsenting members of the public (he’d probably outlaw kissing on buses). I prefer him, though, to the hardened criminals: those who believe that explicit consent provides a license to do anything. Beaten to within an inch of your life? Well, you said it was ok beforehand! People don’t always act in their own self-interest, experience certainly shows that I don’t, although I intend to in future. All of this means that the precise boundaries of consent are constantly debated in fetish forums, usually by people who aren’t going to do anything more dangerous to life than tap each other with sticks while looking menacing. It’s an academic squabble after we’ve agreed the central points…

I’m curious about how other people resolve the inconsistencies of desire and consent, because it seems like a tangle. And how, from the kinky perspective which so privileges consent, does one deal with the heavy-handed tactics of the vanilla world?

The ensuing debate – attracting 43 comments at the time – was one of the most thought-provoking and enlightening discussions I’ve read on a kinky blog. Well worth a browse – and a great way to round off our “Best of” for another year. We hope you’ve enjoyed it!

Earlier in the week, on a short family holiday with my parents, we wandered past the local Youth Hostel, housed in an austere Victorian building:

A banner outside advertised residential camps. My mind drifted to the 1950s – with such events comprising summer-long stays in a spartan regime. One girl had run away, and after being found had been brought before the local bench for absconding and wasting police time. The magistrate decided that the matter should be dealt with privately, to keep paperwork to a minimum and avoid any embarrassing publicity for the hostel and village. Twelve strokes of the cane were the result, administered with gusto by the local policeman as she bent forward, stripped naked, over the back of a chair in one of the cells beneath the courtroom.

Back in the hostel, it was the manager’s turn to punish her for the trouble she’d caused – and to make an example of her lest any of the other youngsters present were tempted to try the same trick. She was beaten before dinner, in front of the other camp residents, with two of the boys being made to hold her down over a table as she received another dozen on the bare, on top of her earlier judicial stripes.

Needless to say, I didn’t explain to my parents quite why I was so lost in thought!

Yesterday’s chosen post considered the contents of porn, while today we’re look at the ethics of porn production. Where the contents of the material deals with pain in particular, you often hear from consumers who would like to be reassured that nobody is being mistreated in the course of production. Frankly, even if the consumers didn’t care about the cast & crew at all, it would still be a good idea to hold the producers to some set of standards of behaviour.

Pandora Blake attempts to define these standards in a handy bullet-point list, looking at things like consent and boundaries, pay and working conditions, and marketing rhetoric. It’s a fine list as it is, but it’s not a finished manifesto, so we are invited to make suggestions for its improvement. (I didn’t, because I like it as it is. Do you?)

How’s this for a newspaper headline: “Stowaway gets hug, kiss, spanking” (St. Petersburg Times, May 6, 1967. Obviously, I had to click to investigate.

A 20-year-old Australian schoolteacher wanted to see her boyfriend, a Californian sailor, so she stowed away in an admiral’s cabin on an American missile cruiser. I gather she got caught before the ship left port, but some sailors clubbed together to get her a plane ticket to see her beaux.

What followed was this:

There’s an actual OTK spanking picture of Bud and Sandra and the link above, just in case anybody had any doubts that he did it properly.

Aww, the sixties, you were so cute.