The Spanking Writers

For the lovers of black humour, we found this comedy sketch on YouTube. Not for the faint of heart!

I ended up hosting a Board meeting for my business at our house last week – the session necessarily being preceded by several days worth of frantic de-kinking. It was only when we sat down to start work that I realised that the ice bucket in the fireplace was filled with birches for the following weekend’s reformatory. Fortunately, my fellow directors must have assumed it was some modernist flower arrangement, so I managed to escape without questionning.

I did struggle to keep a straight face at a couple of points, though. See, I’d fallen heavily whilst running for a tram in the Netherlands a few days before, and was hobbling on a badly sprained, badly bruised ankle.

“You should use arnica for that,” our company chairman helpfully advised.

“Arnica?” I queried. “What’s that?”

And then our finance chap recommended that I should get myself a cane. I mean, what does one say? (“I’ve got about forty upstairs, but none of them’s meant for walking”?)

The vanilla-people-not-quite-getting-it continued in our local supermarket a couple of days later. We were purchasing rather a large quantity of root ginger, for non-cooking use during a weekend away. The young lass on the checkout placed the ginger on the scales, then stopped and looked at us: “What is this?” . Poor, sweet innocent: if only she knew…

I was reading a completely unrelated forum, and found this quote:

Dad was handy with the razor strop. I used to PRAY he’d start to use a safety razor. No such luck.

Aw. I imagine a pair of sisters pooling their pocket money to buy their father a top-of-the-range safety razor for his birthday.

He receives is gratefully.

The razor strop migrates from the bathroom to a prominent hook on the wall, where from now on it’s used only for one, very painful purpose.

An evocative photo caught my eye whilst googling free-to-use images for a work presentation the other day. (You know how it is: you start off hunting for pictures of ‘businesspeople in meetings’, and your fingers accidentally type ‘public flogging’):

The photograph comes from a 1931 book on entitled ‘Bygone Punishments’ (of which we actually own an earlier copy, dating from 1899, without the illustration in question). The commentary explains that we’re looking at the “Stocks and whiping-post, Aldbury, from a photo by A. Whitford Anderson, Esq., Watford”:

“A half-timbered house, probably Tudor, beside a pond; in the foreground are wooden stocks, with the somewhat unevenly placed holes just visible, and one post higher so as to be used as a whipping post… Today Aldbury is part of the Borough of Dacorum. The stocks and whipping-post are still there, but not as complete.”

Now, I’ve seen lots of photos of whipping posts – but never one that’s so evocative of the era in which they were actually put to use. I can just picture a maid, tied to the post, looking out over the duck pond as she was lashed in front of the watching crowd for stealing butter from her master’s kitchen.

The prominence of the apparatus, bang in the centre of the village, also got me thinking. For in a small place like that, it would be quite impossible for the young lass not to have to walk past the scene of her thrashing on an almost-daily basis – the memories and the sense of shame lasting long after her marks had faded.

A fascinating little incident came to light last month, reported by the Saudi Gazette under the tantalising headline “Committee to probe rioting in Makkah Girl’s Correction Home”:

Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, Emir of Makkah, Saturday ordered the formation of a committee to probe Friday night’s rioting in the Girl’s Correction Home in Makkah, Dr. Ali Al-Hanaki, Director of Social Affairs in Makkah, said.

Four inmates of the correction home and some social workers were injured as clashes broke out in the facility Friday night. Over 65 security men including 15 women jail guards managed to restore order to the Girls’ Correction Home as inmates staged a violent protest when the Ministry of Social Affairs rejected their demand to replace the facility’s director, some employees and liaison officers.

Describing the clashes as “mutiny”, Dr. Al-Hanaki said it was led by some inmates attempting to force the ministry to submit to their demand to replace the director, some female social workers and liaison officers. He said inmates also tore up reports containing records of their past violent behavior. He said preliminary information shows that two social workers who have had differences with the director were responsible for instigating five inmates to press for their demands.

He said the ministry would take harsh action against the violating inmates who exceeded the rules. “What has happened is in flagrant violation of the home’s principles and the ministry’s rules,” he said.

The Correction Home rehabilitates inmates from different parts of the Kingdom and reunites them with their families after they complete the terms to which they have been sentenced. There are 65 inmates in the facility.

Sources said a scuffle broke out between the inmates and the home’s staff last Wednesday which developed into a quarrel and rioting on Friday.

So, here’s the game: what happened next? I can easily extrapolate a real-life story like this into a fantasy world, in which the “harsh action” taken sees those responsible soundly flogged. A whipping with the prison strap for each of the five girls concerned, perhaps – overlaid with a birching for the chief conspirator? Indeed, it sounds just like the sort of dark scene that HH and I would devise to play with willing victims.

And the good news (for those who – like me – are squicked by the idea that something like that might actually happen for real) is that “what happened next” in this case was that the girls’ complaints were found to be justified and the director was dismissed from his post. So, who’s up for re-creating a riot in a correction home?!

She really was adorable. Mid-20s, long straight brown hair just below her shoulders. Curves in all the right places. Her top was cut low – but demurely enough to give away nothing away but the hint of possibility. She giggled as she talked to the train staff wheeling the refreshment trolley through first-class. She’d taken out a book to read – an academic tome, no less. She’s started to make notes. With a fountain pen.

I was falling in lust by the time the train had pulled out of the station.

And that book she was studying? “Hobbes and Leviathan”. That’s be the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, then; his famous book contains some fascinating passages:

A punishment is an evil inflicted by public authority on him that hath done or omitted that which is judged by the same authority to be a transgression of the law, to the end that the will of men may thereby the better be disposed to obedience…

The first and most general distribution of punishments is into divine and human. Of the former I shall have occasion to speak in a more convenient place hereafter.

Human are those punishments that be inflicted by the commandment of man; and are either corporal, or pecuniary, or ignominy, or imprisonment, or exile, or mixed of these.

Corporal punishment is that which is inflicted on the body directly, and according to the intention of him that inflicteth it: such as are stripes, or wounds, or deprivation of such pleasures of the body as were before lawfully enjoyed.

I watched with some interest, wondering how the young lady would respond when she reached the relevant passages. Would there be a smile of recognition, a little blush? Would she glance around the carriage, embarrassed lest anyone had noticed her reading the phrases concerned, and re-reading them, then reading them once more? Might she squirm in her seat, thinking of the boyfriend who’d be awaiting her at the other end of the journey, and the pleasures of the evening to come?

Project Gutenberg kindly shares “Greatheart”, a 1918 novel by Ethel M. Dell – a rather remarkably over-the-top example of setting the scene for a spanking. Our heroine, Dinah, has just broken off her engagement to Sir Eustace on the eve of their wedding, much to her family’s displeasure.

She had been sitting there for hours, after a terrible scene with her mother downstairs… She knew that a cruel ordeal yet awaited her. There was the morrow to be faced, the morrow with its renewal of disgrace and punishment. Her mother was furious with her… She had gone to her room, thankful to escape, but neither tea nor supper had followed her thither.

Sir Eustace might forgive. He had been extraordinarily generous. A lump rose in her throat as she thought of him. But the de Vignes, all those wedding guests who were to have honoured the occasion, they would all look upon her with contumely for evermore. No wonder her mother was enraged against her! No wonder! No wonder! She would never have another chance of holding up her head in such society again.

A great sigh escaped her. What was the good of sitting there thinking? She had undressed long ago, and she was cold from head to foot. Yet somehow she had forgotten or been too miserable to go to bed… Wearily she turned to put out her candle. But ere her hand reached it, she paused in swift apprehension.

The next instant sharply she started round to see the door open, and her mother entered the room. Gaunt, forbidding, full of purpose, she walked in, and set her candle down beside the one that Dinah had been about to extinguish.

“Get up!” she said to the startled girl. “Don’t sit there gaping at me! I’ve come here to give you a lesson, and it will be a pretty severe one I can tell you if you attempt to disobey me.”

“What do you want me to do?” breathed Dinah.

She stood up at the harsh behest, but she was trembling so much that her knees would scarcely support her. Her heart was throbbing violently, and each throb seemed as if it would choke her. She had seen that inflexibly grim look often before upon her mother’s face, and she knew from bitter experience that it portended merciless treatment.

Mrs. Bathurst did not reply immediately. She went to a little table in a corner which Dinah used for writing purposes, and opened a blotter that lay upon it. From this she took a sheet of note-paper and laid it in readiness, found Dinah’s pen, opened the ink-pot. Then, over her shoulder, she flung a curt command: “Come here!”

Dinah went, every nerve in her body tingling, her face and hands cold as ice.

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An episode in “Sweet Silver Blues” by Glen Cook amused me. The hero finds out that a woman hired a thug to beat him up. Before the thug (reluctantly) does the job, the hero makes him a counter offer:

“That woman across the street. The one that sicced you onto me. When we’re done here I want you to take her down to the Bazaar, strip her down naked, bend her over your lap, and give her thirty good whacks on the backside. Then turn her loose and let her walk home.”

“Naked?”

“Naked.”

“She wouldn’t get out of the Bazaar, Garrett.”

“There’s another five in it if she gets home all right. But without finding out you’re looking out for her.”

Sounds like a reasonable deal…

The authorities in Hong Kong held a rather interesting-sounding exhibition back in 2006 “to mark the decommissioning of 160-year-old Victoria Prison, Hong Kong’s first jail”.

Apparently, “department officers dressed in historic uniforms [showed] the changes in attire over the years” from the former Prisons Department, which “was renamed the Correctional Services Department in 1982″.

I’m rather wondering which uniform was used by the punishment officers…

Visitors were also able to inspect “records of corporal punishment as ordered by judges from 1946 to 1977″, as well as the prison’s rather ferocious-looking cat-o’-nine tails:

I think the young ladies in my previous post a little while back about colonial days got off rather lightly with a caning…

I was re-reading “Eyes of the Dragon” by Stephen King, and found an episode I had completely forgotten. The young prince, Peter, protects a sick horse from being put down, by swearing to take care of it himself. Unfortunately, he goes about it in a very non-diplomatic way, so his father, King Roland, is honour-bound to punish him.

Peter was whipped for interfering in the head groom’s affairs, and although it was no solace to his stinging bottom, Peter’s mind understood that his father had afforded him great honor by administering the whipping himself, instead of handing Peter over to an underling who might have tried to curry favor by making it easy on the boy.

Peter could not sleep on his back for three days and was not able to eat sitting down for nearly a week, but the head groom was also right about the horse-Roland allowed Peter to keep her.

This is the sort of spanking that really appeals to me: not done in anger, but because it has to be. And everybody’s happy, even though you can’t sit down for a week.