The Spanking Writers

A lovely, if cruel, little scene came to mind as we cruised down the Grand Canal in Venice on our luxury launch the other day*. A young woman, daughter of a nobleman, was in her bedchamber in her family’s palazzo, overlooking the water. As servants busied themselves in the background, a fierce argument was playing out between the girl and her mother.

You see, it was the day of the girl’s wedding, and her father had betrothed her – much against her will – to the much-older son of the ruling Doge. The marriage would bring great advantage to the family’s fortunes – but which bright young maiden wants to be paired up with some old fogey, no matter how influential and wealthy, purely for her parents’ political ambitions?

Tempers flared as the maids tried to dress the girl for the impending service. Eventually the mother’s patience gave way, and the young woman found herself flung over the maternal lap and on the receiving end of a hard hand spanking.

Far from calming her, the punishment had precisely the opposite effect, for as soon as it was over, the lass grabbed her wedding dress, opened the windows on to the balcony, and flung the expensive garment into the water below.

She was taken to her father: the soundest of whippings ensued… and the wedding proceeded that afternoon as planned.

Returning to ponder the scene some more as I wrote it up later, it struck me that she would doubtless prove to be most unwilling when her new husband came to take advantage of his marital rights that evening. But afterwards, he would hold her tight; he’d tell her that he knew he might not have been her ideal choice of spouse, but would vow to be a good husband and look after her well if she’d try to love him back…

* OK, it was one of the public vaporetto boats, but one can dream…

Here’s a very recent post, which crept into our “best of” selection almost at the last minute. It’s a story by Janice, of “Strange Imagination” – of which the following should give you a taste:

It was not a long way from the dungeons of the City Hall to the scaffold in the square. The guards were smiling when they collected me. ‘Quite a crowd, lass…”

They secured my hands behind my back and didn’t care much as I gasped when the ropes hurt me. My dress was flimsy as it was and with my hands behind my back I could do nothing to prevent it from sliding off my shoulder. The guards looked at me and thought I was presentable.

I walked on trembling legs and as the door opened and I met the mob, my heart began trembling as well. The excitement and the cheer that greeted me almost encouraged me, almost made me as excited as they were.

The strong guards protected me as we made our way through the crowd. I hesitated at the stair to the scaffold but was pushed onto the stage…I could do nothing but stand there, bound and look out over the multitude of faces. Should I keep my head high and antagonise them, or should I bow my head and be humble? Neither alternative changed what was going to happen.

Then the crowd broke out in a frenzy. They were taken by their own madness, shouting and cheering and staring. I turned my head and saw what had sparked them. I saw him.

He was the real performer, the one they had come for. He was the master and artist. They had come to see him work. They had not come for me. I was the clay he would work on, I was a tool for his skill. I was the one to be mastered by him…

He made a gesture and the guards pushed me forward. I was stood before the crowd, at the edge of the scaffold, alone with the crowd.

I stood in silence, staring in awe at them. I was waiting, the crowd was waiting. I didn’t see the gesture, I felt it. The crowd felt it. The guards took hold of my flimsy garment and tore at it. I gasped as I almost lost balance and fell. The fabric was torn from my body to the cheering and cries of the crowd…

The guards pulled me away from the edge of the platform and pushed me towards the sturdy pole set in the middle… The ropes around my wrists were loosened and my hands were pulled forward, one on each side of the wooden post. My wrists were retied in front and to a rope that ran through a hoop at the top of the pole. Strong arms pulled at the rope and my hands were hoisted in the air.

I cried out in pain as my hands were pulled upwards. I could hardly breathe as I was lifted from the floor, only my toes in contact with the wood. When they were done, I was almost hanging from my bound wrists, my body tense and pressed to the unforgiving whipping post.

I was prepared. I had been made ready for the whip. Now it was time for the entertainment..

.. which we’ll leave for you to enjoy across at Janice’s blog!

Our American friends have been sending their young children off to school this week. This made me think about my own primary school days. Particularly the merit and demerit system used in my school, and how I used to fantasise it was ever so slightly different.

I started school in one of the last years of the Communist rule, and so the discipline structure was quite interesting. The first grade was divided into 5-person groups (called “the stars”), with one kid in charge (“the commander”). I was the commander, naturally.

Now, when one of the kids did something impressive, the whole group got a merit mark, a little red star that went on a bulletin board against your group’s name. If one of you was naughty, the group received a blue circle. And the six or so groups in the class competed with each other as to which one was doing best. The thinking was, I suppose, that if there was a naughty kid in one of the “stars”, the other four would guilt them into being slightly better behaved.

As the commander, I was somewhat responsible for my naughty boys (I had two), and was frequently told that I should exert influence over them somehow. I did the best I could. But mostly I just spent a lot of time wondering what would happen if, miraculously, the school introduced spanking for getting too many demerit marks. Would it be only the naughty kid who got spanked, or the whole of his “star”? Or maybe just the kid and his commander? For the commander to be spanked would have been the perfect way of me to get what I wanted without actually having to misbehave, which would have been just perfect.

The Soviet education system didn’t believe in spanking. Shaming, group responsibility – yes, spanking – no. Yet, whenever I think back to the bulletin board with the little red stars and blue circles, I wonder how the spankings would have been arranged.

Very efficiently, with much ideology behind them, I have no doubt.

OK, so while we’re breaking our usual no- illustration rule on The Spanking Writers, during our week of highlights we’ve selected from other blogs, how about this from Waldo Blog – part of a post on the techniques he uses to create spanking graphics:

And here’s another sketch we loved, posted by Isabelle183 at “Autour de la fessee”:

As Haron crawled into bed on our last night in Florence, turning off the lights, it struck me that our grand hotel must have opened in the pre-electricity era.

I imagined a maid, all those years ago, lighting the candles in a gentleman’s room. She’d stumble; disaster would strike as the thick velvet drapes caught light. Flames would start to flicker… and the distinguished guest would react just in time, the bucket of iced water averting calamity.

Calamity for the hotel, that is, if not for the maid. An incident so serious would have had to be drawn to the attention of the general manager; the following morning the girl would find herself tied naked over a table in the staff quarters, the other housemaids assembled to watch her exemplary punishment. The gravity of the potential consequences of her carelessness would be discussed; the whipping that would follow would be justifiably severe.

We don’t often feature illustrations here – this site having been conceived as a literary spanking blog. But we thought we’d permit ourselves a few pictures as part of our summer series – not photos per se, but other graphics that have appealed. First up, a rather delightful image from “Au Fils des Jours”, a lovely French blog:

The same blog also featured a painting by artist Henry Raleigh (1880-1944).Whilst not in itself kinky, it’s not difficult to imagine that a scolding is taking place now that the gentleman has tracked down the young lady to whom he is speaking:

We might as well share another picture by Raleigh whilst we’re about it, from an entirely vanilla site:

Our imagined back-story? The young lady’s lawyer has taken her discreetly to one side at a soiree, and informed her that the result of her appeal came through that afternoon. “Sadly, my dear, they upheld your conviction and sentence. You are to report to the police station on Tuesday at three, to receive your birching…”

As I look out of the window at the grey, rain-soaked horizon on my first working day after the holiday, my mind wanders to what it must have been like to be a young teacher returning to a boarding school just before the start of the school term.

The girls are not back yet, only the staff, and although the young woman enjoys teaching, she can feel the vaults of the venerable institution pressing down on her, weighing her to the ground. After a summer spent with her college friends in Provence, with much laughing, drinking and silliness, she is shocked to be among the adults again, expected to set the standards of behaviour, and to enforce them.

She jolted particularly unpleasantly when one morning the janitor delivers the supply of new canes for her classroom: two each of junior and senior canes, to be hung on hooks in a cupboard, like umbrellas – but far more sinister. She knows very well that, despite her reluctance to use corporal punishment, she will do so with no outward hesitation when there’s need. Such is the culture of the school; the girls expect it, as much as the other teachers.

She goes through the lists of her pupils, and wonders which one of them will need to be caned first, and for what sins, and how. Most likely, it will be a few quick swats on the hand in the classroom, to get back the miscreant’s wandering attention. Or it might be a stroke or two over the seat of their knickers between lessons.

She knows, though, that sooner or later she will have to issue an instruction for a girl to see her after prep, and then deliver several proper, searing cracks on a reluctantly bared behind. She tries to guess which girl this would be, and briefly wonders about running a sweepstake.

Then she firmly shuts the cupboard on her new arsenal, and goes back to her lesson plan.

Back in 2007, we launched our “Best of the kinky rest” selection – and it’s with great pleasure that we welcome you to the fourth year of the series. The format’s fairly simple – each day for a week or so every August, we share not only our own contribution for the day (as usual), but also a second post featuring an excerpt from another blog entry (or entries) that we’ve particularly loved.

Rules of the game? Well, we’ve tried to select posts from bloggers who don’t often contribute to the comments here at The Spanking Writers, and whom we don’t know personally. It would be easy to fill a week with posts by our friends here, amongst whose number are many of the very best spanking bloggers – but our assumption is that most of you already read each other’s sites.

So in this particular series, we’ve aimed to link to things you might not have seen previously, or to sites to which we’ve not previously linked, from writers we don’t know in person. Most of the shortlisting was done by me [Abel]; Haron’s vetted, assessed, endorsed the entries we’ve chosen to include.

Anyway, here goes with entry number 1 – extracted from a recent post from Bonnie-jo at her “Life of a College Spanko” site, entitled “Good Girl or Bad Girl?”:

I’ve always been the good girl.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my moments of mischief. But those were moments I could count on one hand.

Teachers counted on me to watch the class when I was gone. My parents left me in charge. Other kids parents trusted me. But I remember the class clowns, the bad kids, the kids with “behavior problems”. They received the attention, and not just the teacher’s attention, but they held their place securely as the class’ main entertainment. And they held my secret wish to be like them.

I remember wishing that my parents did not love me. Their love forced me, I felt, to be good, to not disappoint. My parents had this special way of looking at me and my brothers with sad eyes and a long sigh, “I’m very disappointed in you,” they’d say. They didn’t say it much. I made sure of that.

Well, needless to say, you can’t live your life for someone else forever…. So I finally failed to an extent. I dated a guy they didn’t approve of and lived with him. It was a good start on the road to being bad…

Yes, it’s fun to brat and annoy a top. It’s fun to see what he will do, to see his tolerance level and response. But what about letting someone down? What about when I hear, “I’m disappointed in you, Bonnie-jo.” What about when I have to confess the darkness inside of me? It hurts. It doesn’t hurt as much as a spanking, but it lasts much longer, potentially a life time…

To me, a spanking equals acceptance, love, caring.  I get high on this. I am comforted by this. So no, I’m not a good girl yearning to be bad. At least that’s not the complete picture.

I’m a good girl and a bad girl. And when I’m bad, I am spanked. So that I can be a good girl again.

P.S. But I still like being bad….at least for a couple seconds. Don’t we all?

I posted last week (“Still Daddy’s Girl”) about the number of twenty-something American girls travelling in Italy with their families. Later in the trip (from which we’ve now sadly returned), we sat at the next table to a slightly younger lass, enjoying dinner with her parents – giggling at her dad’s jokes, blushing at the waiter’s flirtatious attentions.

We surmised that she had just finished her final year at school; the European trip was by way of congratulations on her top grades and admission into some prestigious university. She’d be about to start her gap year – which, her father had decreed, would be spent in the sixth form of a very traditional English girls’ boarding school. For her to pass A Levels with top grades in one year rather than the usual two would require ferociously hard work – but her great-grandmother had been educated at the same establishment prior to the family’s emigration to the States, and some traditions deserve to be upheld.

Clearly, a guardian would need to be appointed for her time in the UK. After all, she’d need somewhere to stay during those long weekends and mid-term breaks, when travel back to the States wouldn’t be feasible. And she’d need someone nearby to monitor her progress at first hand, and to deal with any disciplinary matters that may require attention.

When she arrived at her home-from-home in late October for her first half-term break, she’d hand over the envelope with her report card. It’d glitter with praise – A grades, top marks for effort. Her guardian would congratulate her – perhaps even proposing a small glass of congratulatory champagne. But she’d hesitate, blush, then hand over a second envelope: “My housemaster also told me to give you this.”

The neatly-typed letter would be short, to the point. The group of girls had failed to appear for the first lesson after lunch on the day before the half-term break. When they had belatedly returned to school premises, it had been established that they had spent their break in the local public house. Each girl had therefore received six strokes of the cane from her housemaster.

And family traditions must prevail… She’d be sent to her room, and told to get ready for bed, despite it only being seven in the evening. Her guardian would follow, an hour or so later, crook-handled cane in hand. “Two strokes at home for every one at school” would be the rule: he’d make her lower her pyjama bottoms and touch her toes, before administering the painful punishment. A hug would follow, and the gentleman would then retire to his study to compose a note to her parents…

Yesterday morning we asked a young hotel concierge a question about some particulars of Venetian public transportation. The boy – an apple-cheeked, smiley blonde creature – jokingly said that we seemed to have a better grasp on the workings of the traghetto than he did, because he was a new trainee, on a recent transfer from Germany.

Abel wished him good luck, and said, “I hope you’re enjoying Venice as much as  we are.”

The boy’s face showed a sour grimace, and then he laughed embarrassedly at having displayed a genuine emotion. “Uh, it’s very…”

From the side, an older concierge crept up and deftly grabbed the boy by the ear, giving it a mock twist. “It’s very… good for tourists!” the trainee concluded, blushing like a virgin bride.

We laughed and departed. I felt very evil for spending a good portion of our subsequent walk imagining a flogging the lad undoubtedly received in the back office.