A spanking blogger once more, or what I did during my sabbatical

I’m not sure where the hell to start this post, so I’ll start with the conclusion: I got the cane the other day, as a punishment for a flaw I had requested help with eliminating. The caning hurt, but no more than my pride did for having earned it in the first place. Then I felt better. Then I decided to write a blog post about it.

The paragraph above reads like something I’ve written many times before, but both the event and the decision to blog about it were a novelty to me. Because I hadn’t wanted to be punished for real-life things for a long time, and now I do again. Because my ally in this exercise is Jimmy, for whom a discipline dynamic is a curious new beast he’s exploring at my instigation, rather than a deep-seated kink. Because I haven’t done a stitch of blogging since September, after having blogged at least every other day for over five years. Because my life is so different now than it was less than half a year ago, that I wonder how I can recognise these fingers that are falling on the keys in front of me.

Far from the thought that everybody in the world follows my every move with bated breath, I’m going to give you a short digest of recent events, which can both get you up to speed with where I am, and set the backdrop for the punishment caning that is, after all, the point of this post.

September: Ask husband for a break. Move out with one suitcase, one cat and £600 to my name. Agree to promise not to say a word about it on the Internet; regret the promise instantly because suddenly I’m unable to blog or tweet truthfully about what I’m doing without raising questions. Arrange a room-in-exchange-for-work agreement with a friend’s business, where my boyfriend Jimmy is also living. Lose room and work because of the business going down; receive an offer of floor space from a friend’s friend, move again, this time to the outskirts of London.
October: Sleep on a single mattress in a tiny room with the cat’s litter tray at my feet. Frantically apply for office jobs while trying to stay on top of freelance obligations. Die of sexual frustration due to lack of a bed or any privacy. Turn 32. Go dancing all night for the first time ever. Have mind-blowing sex with Jimmy’s other girlfriend Shona (she has a bed). Come down with a chest infection. Recover in time to win a month-long freelance contract with obligatory office hours. Help Jimmy move house (he now also has a bed). Help Shona temporarily move into Jimmy’s place (down to one bed between three again). Feel isolated. Feel lonely. Feel furious at being unable to express myself through blogging. Prefer this anyway.
November: Commute for 3 hours a day to freelance job; work on existing freelance commitments in the evenings. Help Shona move house (yay, two beds again). Shona asks me to be her girlfriend. Jimmy stretches his dominant muscles. I can’t remember when I’ve last had more than one waking hour off. Bite the bullet and tell Abel I’m not coming back; wait for him to be comfortable to make the break-up public knowledge. Could now, in theory, blog again, but can barely see straight for fatigue. Get contract extended.
December: Work days, work evenings. Look for a place to live. Transfer my entire pay to an estate agent and acquire a flat with two bedrooms: one for Jimmy, one for me. Move house; help Jimmy move house. Enjoy having a door and a bed. Pick up my stuff from Abel’s house in a manoeuvre that requires shoving my entire life into a van in two hours. Lose most of the memory of that evening; go to work the next day. Finish contract. Stop functioning for a week. Jimmy has surgery. Reluctantly return Shona to her family for a few days; survive Christmas. Jimmy turns 28. See in 2012; dance all night, have lots of sex, play guitar. Start thinking about blogging.

And so we return to the issue of the punishment caning.

One day I let Jimmy and Shona know that I was going to spend a few hours working on my blog.  They made all the right encouraging noises, and I settled at a desk to write.

Here are some of the things I did instead: read Twitter, read FandomWank, read LiveJournal, read some more Twitter while clicking every single link and checking out all the retweeted profiles, watch some Dreams of Spanking movies and read comments on all the scenes. You will notice that none of these activities have in any way involved any writing. When Jimmy finally asked me how the blogging was going, all I could say was, “Errr… FandomWank is great.”

“Would you like some help with that?” he asked. In our relationship this question has developed a new meaning: would you like to give me the authority to make you do this, under the threat of punishment?

Yes, I did.

Subsequently, Shona named the series of exchanges that followed “The Jimmy and Adele Show”. It had dialogues like:

Jimmy: “Put down the summary of all the paragraphs you’re going to write.”
Adele: “Can I finish reading this LiveJournal thread?”
Jimmy: “You can, after you’re done.”

and

Jimmy, from *another room*: “Your word processor looks very similar to your FireFox skin.”
Adele: “…”
Jimmy: “Go on, you can do it. Extend the first summary into a paragraph.”
Adele: “WHY DO YOU HATE FUN?”

The cajoling worked for a while, but the post I was writing – the stupidly long essay about the R v. Peacock trial – was a complex beast. I needed to find a selection of articles to link to, some choice tweets, some news items. I kept taking Twitter breaks; these kept getting longer. Finally Jimmy told me that I was to stay off Twitter until further notice.

I tried. I tried so hard, you may have seen steam of the effort coming out of my ears. When I succumbed to temptation in the end, it didn’t even feel very good. I was so ashamed that I barely skimmed a few tweets, and went back to writing straight away, but my heart was heavy with self-disappointment.

I wondered whether to tell him, or to wait until I was asked. I decided I would tell, but not right away, because by this time we’d broken off for dinner, and I didn’t want the entire evening to be about me. I told Shona though. She doesn’t have a punishment kink (as far as we know), but she’s been cheer-leading me through my efforts with the understanding of somebody who’d looked writing block in the face before. She offered me a hug and much sympathy, and it felt better not to carry my guilt around all on my own.

I made my confession the following morning, sick with shame. Jimmy was all sympathy, but sentenced me to a stroke per tweet I’d read, anyway. We’d been experimenting with discipline for several months by then, and he tends to save corporal punishment for a last resort. He’d used it only twice before. The fact that he saw it as necessary now very nearly brought me to tears: it was this, not the eventual caning, that felt like the lowest point of the entire episode.

This didn’t make the writing any easier; I ended up earning twenty-five strokes in total over the course of the day, but at least, eventually, the post was done. And then the caning was done, with me lying flat on the bed with a corner of a pillowcase between my teeth. It felt natural and okay: not a judgement on me as a person, not a pretext for either of us getting off; just a friendly favour, albeit a painful one.

And this was how I came back to being a spanking blogger.

To munch or not to munch?

We know how the standard advice to spanking and BDSM newbies goes, right? To meet people to play with, get thee to a munch. It doesn’t matter if you’re shy, antisocial, poor or privacy-conscious: in order to dip your toes into the local scene, you must consume a certain amount of alcohol in the company of other perverts. It’s the only way. Off to a munch with you.

Now, from the snark quotient in the paragraph above you may conclude that I don’t like the idea of munches. No, no, I do. They obviously work really well, or there wouldn’t be so bloody many of them. I want to be one of the people for whom munches work so well. I long to love munches.

They don’t love me, though.

Here’s the sad, twisted story of my unrequited love affair with munches.

My first one was a spanking munch in a small town near where I used to live in the North-East. Let me list the grand-total of all attendees at that one, other than Mr Haze and I: the organiser, an I’m-sure-he’s-not-always-that-boring older gent, and the latter’s I’m-sure-she’s-fascinating-if-she’d-only-bloody-ever-speak wife. That was it. The conversation was so painfully strained, I was longing to safe-word my way out of it. Not that it would have helped, because a couple of months later it turned out that the organiser of the munch had a history of not respecting women’s safewords. And here was me, trying not to be sniffy about his dirty mac.

Then there was a general BDSM munch in a bigger city quite a drive away. This was well-attended, well-organised and clearly well-loved by the locals, judging by the fact that everybody bloody knew each other by this point, and you know how much fun it is to be in a room of 70 people who know one another, with an occasional newcomer here and there. There was a party game, oh yes: each person was supposed to write down a yet unfulfilled fantasy and throw the piece of paper into a hat, and then everybody in the room was supposed to guess whose fantasy this was. Have a guess at how much of a chance I stood of guessing secret fantasies of complete bloody strangers, or for them to guess mine.

Then there was a lovely spanking munch in Scotland. This was small enough to be manageable, yet big enough to have plenty of interesting people in it. Everybody was great. I knew several people from spanking forums, and had looked forward to meeting them. What a shame, then, that I sat at the end of the table, and the only person whose conversation I could hear over the pub music was one of the friends I’d come with in the first place. (Who also kept calling me by my real name: something guaranteed to send me into a killing rage.)

Skip several years, during which the only way to get me to a munch would have been to invite the munch into my living-room. In the meantime, I somehow managed to make lots of new scene friends, none of whom seemed to mind that we hadn’t met in a pub to start with. Funny how that worked.

Anyway, a group of girlfriends lured me to this supposedly wonderful BDSM munch in London that they all went to all the time. Well, call it a glitch, but this particular time it turned out mind-crushingly boring. Pretty much all of the painfully cool people around the big table were into all sorts of arcane fetishes and practices none of us knew anything about, and nobody at all wanted to talk about spanking. The four of us bailed after an hour, and instead went to one of the girls’ house, where her husband generously spanked us all. That was much better.

You may have guessed where this post is leading. I’m actually contemplating going to a munch again. Not even contemplating, really: I’ve definitely decided I’m going. The London Under35 Kinky Drinkies has an excellent reputation, and I know a couple of people who go, so I’m guaranteed to have at least two conversations over the course of the evening. (More if I manage to sweet-talk some friends into coming with me.) Anyway, I’m older and wiser now, and I’m definitely due a positive munch experience.

I think.

I hope.

Yes, definitely.

Fun spanking boys

I was lazily browsing the keywords that had brought people to my site, when one search phrase jumped out at me.

“Is it fun spanking boys?” an unknown searcher had asked Google.

If by “boys” we mean “grown consenting men”, then I would like to take a moment to let my eyes glaze over in a lust-filled daydream. How much fun is spanking boys, let me count the ways…

Purely physically, it’s a real sensual treat to have a boy over my lap: a long body, so large and present, hard in places, soft where it matters. Buttocks exposed, skin not yet reddened, but about to bounce and wobble under my hand. Watching marks appear and fill with colour as the spanking progresses, hearing his breath catch as he registers the pain, little noises he lets himself make. A slight tingling in my palm; knowing that his bottom is tingling much more acutely and urgently.

And then there’s the emotional side: feeding on his trust, receiving his vulnerability, alleviating his caution, gently enveloping him in my care, floating on his submission.

Yes, unknown searcher, it’s lots of fun, spanking boys. If you’re a boy, somebody will have tons of fun spanking you, and if you’re the one wondering about giving some lucky boy a spanking – go for it, it’s great. (Then come back and tell me all about it.)

Schoolgirl spanking: a favourite fantasy

Pleated skirts. Cotton knickers. Pigtails. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Books pressed to the chest. A wooden desk with a hole for an inkwell. Shorthand for a fantasy so familiar that we don’t even question where it’s coming from, how it works.

Schoolgirl spanking fantasy is central to my spanking kink, and, if I judge by the searches on this blog, it’s a favourite with a great many other people too. If you ask video producers about some of the requests they get, you’re likely to hear that schoolgirl spanking never stops being popular.

There are only so many ways in which you can spank a schoolgirl, only so many scenarios you can come up with. It gets repetitive, it slides along the same rails over and over, and yet we don’t tire of it. Why?

Obviously, I can’t speak for you, but here are some of the things I enjoy about schoolgirl spanking:

• The natural imbalance of power. Be it a prefect or a teacher, they wield the sort of power that lets them impose their will on me without question or appeal.
• Institutional nature. School rules are simple and unbending, and there is no way to escape their strictures. Most people go through their whole lives without seeing the inside of a prison, but for most of us there’s no escape from 10 or more years of obeying the school rules.
• Inherent lawfulness. At least in my fantasies, spanking is the right and proper response to misbehaviour. There’s no dubious ethics involved in, say, offering somebody a spanking as an alternative to dismissal: prefects and teachers are acting in accordance with law and custom.
• Uniforms! Need I explain?

I can take just about unlimited amount of schoolgirl spanking movies and stories. I know they’re very similar. I don’t mind.

How about you? Does the schoolgirl spanking fantasy work for you? Do you know why?

Dominance in fantasy and reality

Some days all I need is to sink my nails deep in Jimmy’s flesh, and hear him whimper, and not let go. And some days all I want is a back rub and some vanilla caresses. I’ve been sick through the most part of the last two months (better now, thank you), and it’s been quite a revelation to me how my dominant side behaved when fever and pain were at the forefront.

I’ve long known that, when I’m sick, I don’t particularly feel like bottoming, but this bout of flu and related unpleasantness was my first since I made friends with my dominant side. It’s been interesting to find how my psyche reacted.

I still wanted to give orders. I most of all desired to be pampered, taken care of, and spoiled to a ridiculous degree. All perfectly domly desires, and for the few days I spent with Jimmy, I’m sure we could have got into a routine where he catered to my every whim, his only reward a benevolent smile and a pat on the rump.

Instead, my guilt switched on. I still ended up mostly cared for, but I couldn’t make it kinky, because I was feeling so damn terrible about it. Instead of being pleasurable, it was excruciating.

I also wanted to give pain, but I couldn’t trust myself to provide the necessary aftercare. Which would have been irresponsible and inconsiderate. So I reined in my sadism, and basically turned into a very small, very pathetic feline who was harbouring evil thoughts, but not really acting on any of them.

It’s been an interesting two months.

Now I’m sufficiently recovered that I’ve gone back to being satisfyingly evil to Jimmy, but that’s another story entirely.