The Spanking Writers

I’m slightly worried this morning, because yesterday Abel phoned from the foreign city he’s working in, and gleefully informed me that he’d not only found the craft market within the first millisecond of being in town, but he’s also bought a hairbrush and a giant wooden spoon.

Hand-made, I suppose. Um, yay. Go us for supporting local crafts.

Something in his voice told me that I’m going to either hate these things, or loathe them, or maybe despise them.

Strange, strange dream on Tuesday night…

Scene: a large room – a hall, school gymnasium or similar

Furnishings: three whipping benches

The cast: three girls tied tightly over aforementioned benches, three punishment officers, an assembled crowd of onlookers and dignitaries watching proceedings

Props: one birch rod, one cane, one prison strap

Storyline: an experiment is being conducred to assess the efficacy of different implements as a means of punishment. The girls are flogged simultaneously, each receiving 50 strokes with one of the three implements. The punishment officers and others present then discuss their reactions and inspect their marks.

Now I have no idea where or when this was set: sometimes dreams are light on details. But on subsequent reflection, I’m guessing that it must have been a newly-opened Victorian reform school for girls. The master needed to determine how his inmates would be punished, and so decided to conduct a little test with the first three young ladies sent into his care by the courts.

And the dream was quite inconclusive as to the outcome of the research. I’m rather guessing that the cane would have won, but it must have been a close-run thing…

The punishment position in pretty much all of my early spanking fantasies was the ever-so traditional “touching toes” (with just one minor variant: “holding ankles”).

Furniture then started to creep in – always high-backed, plain, wooden chairs. This sort of thing, for example:

My imagined headmasters’ offices then acquired robust old leather sofas (with arms over which girls could bend), and my fantasy housemasters were persuaded to clear the piles of paper from their desks to make space for punished pupils.

But here’s the strangest thing: I honestly can’t recall the last time when, playing a scene, I made a young lady touch her toes (rather than having her bent over a school desk or table or the end of a bed) – partly, I suspect, since many play partners struggle to assume said position comfortably (which, one suspects, was always actually rather its point). And we don’t even own a plain wooden chair. I think it’s time for a return to traditional values… and for a chair-hunting trip around our local antique shops.

Where spanking implements are concerned, I consider myself sufficiently well-educated. I thought, until recently, that I knew every instrument of spanking worth knowing about, at least among what the Western civilisation had to offer.

That was until Mija discovered the “palmer”, which was a medieval education aid. It’s a “stick with a round, flattened head with which to slap students palms.” So, a sort of paddle, but for the hand! I want one.

I was particularly fascinated to find that it’s also called “palmeta” in Spanish and “palmatoria” in Portuguese, which just shows you how international spanking implements were in medieval times.

Excuse me while I picture myself as a medieval young woman who disguises herself as a boy in order to take calligraphy lessons. The master is armed with a palmer, which has a wicked sting, but when I hand out my hand for punishment, my eyes must remain dry. All the boys are looking on to see if I’ll cry from this chastisement. I mustn’t cry; I mustn’t.

Ever since our move to a bigger house in April, we’ve made a point to keep our spanking implements both tidy and accessible. There are the umbrella stands full of canes, there’s a school trunk stuffed with smaller toys, plus a random box or folder here and there.

I was hauling all these nice things out to receieve a kinky friend the other day, and it felt to me like, from a housekeeping point of view, maybe there’s too much stuff here. The trunk definitely doesn’t close as easily as it should. Still, I thought, we can just about manage with the tidy and accessible thing, as long as we remember to put things away.

Then I went under the bed to retrieve my phone charger – and there, staring at me, was a splintery wine crate full of implements. Which I had no idea was there. So it turns out, we have even more than I thought we did, when I thought we maybe had too many.

I’m scared of opening the closet. I’m scared of looking into the wardrobes. You can bet I’m scared of going down into the cellar.

There might be forgotten spanking toys there.

Waiting.

Vengeful.

Abel called me from the kitchen in his “I’m about to smack you” voice. When I arrived, I saw that he was grinning from ear to ear, and also that he was hiding something behind his back.

“Bend over,” he said, very pleased with himself. “Hands on your knees.”

I obeyed.

Something invisible swung up and cracked down, leaving quite intense, not unpleasant sting.

“Ow?” I asked.

Another two strokes, in quick succession. This time I yelped with more conviction.

“Very good,” said Abel. “You can stand up. Do you like my new implement?”

And he produced from behind his back the single least romantic kitchen pervertible my bottom has ever encountered.

Any guesses what it was?

Don’t bother trying, I’ll tell you.

It was an empty tube from a roll of baking foil.

!!!

Some things make excellent spanking implements, but must, nevertheless, never ever be used as such. Ever.

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!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I popped over to Germany last week. And, dear readers, you’ll be pleased to learn that I found the heaviest-looking, most beautifully-crafted belt *ever* in a small Stuttgart side-street shop. I was in a state of some rapture – and that was before I read the label:

Solidly Scottish from belt to buckle

Since 1887, McRostie saddles, bridles & harnesses were cut, stitched and styled better than they needed to be. They were designed to last longer than their owners.

Your McRostie belt is made using the same craftsmanship from a bridle leather identifcal to that which once withstood the pulling power of Scottish workhorses.

Does the name ‘McRostie’ mean anything to you? Well, it does to me, as something of a scholar of spanking implements. You may well have heard of John J. Dick of Lochgelly, the most famous tawse maker – but various other saddlers competed for the school strap business, and McRostie’s of Glasgow was one of the more famous. (There’s an excellent article at Saxon Web on the history of the tawse, if you’re interested in learning more).

McRostie! I just had to invest…

Later, I found more technical details about my new prize possession on the shop’s English website – “The stitched saddle leather belt comprises three different layers, whereby the 1.5 mm thick outer leather is stitched to the 4 mm thick leather lining. These belts have a total thickness of 7 mm.” And it even has a photo of the manufacturing process, doubtless identical to that used for tawses in days gone by:

Any volunteers to experience a taste of the real Scotland? Or have all of the girls of my acquaintance suddenly taken vows of good behaviour over the course of reading this post?

The saddler’s own website also intrigues, with its section on Special Services:

Do you have your own design? Or something special you would like made up? If you have, we would be delighted to discuss your requirements with you.

I wonder…? Dare I write to them and enquire about a specialist order comprising some of their older product lines?

Sharing a few random pictures from Kyoto…

This, from an old imperial palace, sadly too full of other tourists to be put to the test:

A trip to a renowned Zen temple; Haron wouldn’t let me buy souvenirs from the shop (wooden, thick, about three feet long, perfect – I’d thought – for helping a girl to meditate):

Shopping in the centre of town. Not spanking-related, just deeply wrong…

Our hotel room is helpfully decorated with a rather nice vase of bamboo canes:

Inevitably, these were put to use on Monday for Haron’s birthday spanking. Here’s the aftermath:

(No, don’t ask about the ‘lipstick’. Let’s just say that the Japanese are creative designers and Haron was a very happy birthday girl).

PS we may, just may, be getting a little culturally-overdosed. Take last night’s conversation after a few drinks in the exec lounge (Haron having decided to try sake for the first time), when I asked, “Shall we go to the hotel restaurant and eat foreign food surrounded by foreign people, or have a nice club sandwich from room service here in our room in our nice fluffy bathrobes?”

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).