The Spanking Writers

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.

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!

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?)

When considering the question of whether most of something-or-other does or does not possess a particular quality, you can hand-wave and make a few guesses, or you can look at research and numbers. (Or perhaps at lack of research and numbers.)

In “Porn by the Numbers 2: Is pornography violent?” Dr Brooke Magnanti (also known as Belle De Jour) dissects the myth about the violence of porn, and she quotes some research papers to back up her assertions. There are plenty of links to follow, and lots to sink your teeth in – enjoy.

The posts I’ve selected this year seem to have something of a common theme – about people embracing and exploring their spanking interests. Today’s, from Zille Defeu, is fascinating because it talks about the evolution of her kink, from being primarily BDSM-oriented to encompassing more spanking play.

When I first moved from BDSMville to the spankosphere, my attitude was the usual one you’d find in a dungeon: masochism is gooooood – in fact, the people who get the most “respect” in that scene are the serious pain sluts who could basically be skinned alive and would yet orgasm repeatedly during the process.

Imagine my confusion, upon entering the spankosphere, to come across people proclaiming loudly that they would do just anything to get out of the upcoming spanking – it was a complete and total paradigm shift, and, as you can see, I’m still not fully comprehending things…

It really took me getting together with Mr. Defeu for me to learn that it was okay to have a scene where I hated – or at least really suffered through – every moment of the spanking (or other assorted play).

In the BDSM world, that’s a huge no-no. The goal is to alchemically transform the raw stuff of pain into shimmering golden threads of pleasure – and if you don’t, the bottom feels inferior and the Top feels they have failed their bottom, and everyone goes home unhappy.

I don’t think it was always like this in BDSM – I think this is a new development. I think the old leather-men who built up that community knew it hurt like the dickens, but pushed through because they needed to, there was nothing for it but to suffer for the eventual rewards.

… Spanking hurts. It’s why humans have used it as punishment for probably as long as we’ve been living in social groupings together. It doesn’t necessarily follow that just because you are turned on by the idea, you have to love all the sensations/aspects of it.

To that extent, we all hate spankings! (At least, the receivers!) Unless it’s nothing more than a tender pattering of gentle love taps, there are going to be some moments where you think, “What the hell did I sign up for?!”

But that is part of the thrill…

I’ve long abhorred the tensions that seem to exist between those who class themselves as “BDSMers”, and the “spankos” – as if the two inter-related communities need to somehow compete. It’s great to read such a positive exploration of some of the similarities and differences between varying types of play.

And on, in our round-up of enjoyable and thought-provoking posts from the past year, to our love friend Indy, entitled  “Age of Innocence”.

In my twenties, I’d wondered idly if I’d ever be able to confide my spanking desires to anyone, even a sexual a partner. Now, two decades later, my desires were no longer a source of embarrassment and isolation; rather, they were now an entree to a new and exciting community. Just by walking in the room, I’d shared perhaps my deepest secret with everyone in the group, and I’d been warmly accepted not in spite of it, but because of it.

… The spanking scene was a godsend. There was nothing at all abnormal about a woman coming out as a spanko at my age. This was my chance to gain experience with the lighthearted flirting, banter, and play that accompany the spanking scene, without having to face most of my insecurities about sexual relationships. I gained a great deal of confidence from my first year in the scene; I’d found plenty of people I enjoyed playing with, and I’d become much less conscious about my body.

The subsequent discussion of sexuality is open, powerful, frank – and moving, too. We’re proud to include it in our selection here.

We wrote here a few years back about designer Pierre Cardin’s plans to restore the Marquis de Sade’s old home. I was pleased to see a BBC report last month describing his excellent progress:

Provence has its fair share of heart-stoppingly beautiful hill-top villages, most of them crowned by a half-ruined castle from which the visitor looks out in blissful reverie over a landscape of lavender, vineyards and distant mountains. But how many of them can also boast of 18th Century sexual perversions, and of revolutionaries baying for the blood of an orgy-addled literary maverick?

Marquis de Sade’s Lacoste château is now mostly in ruins, but has been transformed in recent years thanks to the philanthropy of another maverick, Pierre Cardin… Visitors are treated to views, excellent food and that elusive sensation of stepping into another time.  A little more than two centuries ago, it was where Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade began his career of erotic scandal.

It takes a certain leap of the imagination, but where the cicada now sings there really were orgies with nuns and servant girls. Possibly. We do know the man synonymous with the act of gaining pleasure by inflicting pain on others based much of the action in his later (banned) works on his time in Lacoste…

After a hot climb up steep cobbled lanes, visitors emerge among the ruins of the château. A renovated central section is where Cardin has his home and is off-limits to the public. Otherwise you are free to wander between broken-down walls and vanished gardens, look down on village roofs and muse on what it must have been like in its earlier incarnations…

‘Muse’? Right. Apparently there’s a statue of a pair of outstretched arms. I wonder if it’s ever adorned with rope? Or whether any tourist girl’s yet been thoroughly abused, beaten, shamed in the grounds? I really should plan a trip…

Today’s spotlight is on my favourite of the “kinky rest” selection. “Domism: Role Essentialism and Sexism Intersectionality in the BDSM Scene” is a very long (make sure you’ve got plenty of time to read it), very thorough exploration of an interesting issue: are social interactions in the scene prejudiced in favour of dominant players?

It would be nice if some subculture sat outside every negative social dynamic, every kyriarchal oppressive dynamic, in pristine isolation, free of taint.  It would be nice, but none can.  And so the things that are wrong with the world are wrong with the BDSM community, and more specifically, with the formal community, the organizations and public parties: the Scene.

This is study in intersection.  Among this relatively small group who are non-mainstream in one very specific respect, there are repetitions of and reactions to the oppressive patterns of the larger culture, but they’re not entirely straightforward.  Partiarchal  and heterosexist pattern manifest in some ways, power dynamics reorient themselves along BDSM role lines in other ways, and those things interact in ways that are completely unique to the BDSM community.

[...]

[I]t’s easiest to start at the conclusion.  In The Scene, it’s often the case that the social spaces — I’m not talking about the BDSM play itself, but the social interaction of the participants outside the bounds of play — privilege dominants and devalue submissives.

The article doesn’t make for a comfortable read, whatever your orientation. You may be temped to shout, “No, no, my corner of the scene is nothing like that!” But have a careful read, think about what you’ve experienced and witnessed, and I bet you’ll have some awkward twinges along the way.

Dr Susan Block’s article “The politics of spanking” probably won’t tell you anything you didn’t already know about spanking, but it’s a very nice summary of how adult consensual spanking works that you can point vanillas at for their edification.

Block writes, “Everybody knows that, even if we think it’s a bit kinky, spanking adults can be fun” – and proceeds to give us a tour around the spanking fetish as we know it, from playful spankings in history (birthday spankings may date to Ancient Egypt!) to contemporary role-play. It’s an interesting read.

One minor quibble I have is the rehashing of the idea that people with powerful jobs tend to want to be sexually submissive – this just doesn’t correspond with the top/bottom make-up of the scene as I know it. (If only because most spankos I know got set in their preferences way before they were old enough to have careers.) This may be anecdotal, but then, Block doesn’t claim to have done any research on the topic, either.

Enjoy the article!

Next up, in our annual trawl through other blog posts we’ve enjoyed… a lovely piece from “Olivia’s Secrets” discussing how the author got into “the scene”. (Note that a couple of the illustrations are NSFW):

I sat in the dark with so many other people that I couldn’t see. I felt like a kid on the playground. I sat by the wall in the shadows, all alone and looked at all the other kids, playing and laughing and having fun. They had the courage to say what they wanted to say. They had blogs, they had Twitter. I saw them as the popular kids and I so badly wanted to get to know them…

I guess I needed someone to say: “It’s okay, Olivia. You don’t have to be ashamed. What you’re feeling is perfectly normal.” And then I could go back to the wall and look at them but feel better, because even though I wasn’t “on the scene”, they knew I was there and they’d told me that if I wanted to, I could be part of them.

And then I stepped out of the shadows.

The conclusion’s great, too:

I have to say this; by coming out of the shadows, I became more confident. It helped me in my relationship and it helped me to be happier with myself. So if you’re out there and you’re lurking and you’re scared…you’re welcome here, and you’re welcome on all the other blogs too. It’s okay. You don’t have to be ashamed. Whoever you are, whatever you look like, no matter what you like or what your thoughts are about the world…you are welcome. We may all be different. But we have one thing in common, and that is kink. You don’t have to start a blog or a Twitter account and you don’t even have to comment…but you don’t have to be ashamed either. You’re never alone. Isn’t that amazing?

It’s the sort of post that really might give confidence to others who are toying with embracing their kinky side – and, as such, we loved it.