SpankingCast Episode 10: “Adventures at a spanking shoot”

So, instead of writing my shoot for Pandora, I decided to talk about it in the new episode of SpankingCast.

Get the episode here.

I wish I had pictures to show off, but they’re not ready yet. Pandora has snapped this one with her phone: me and Jimmy canoodling, about to get into a heap of trouble.

Life in spanking after 30: part 2

To celebrate my birthday last week I cast my eye over the professional spanking scene, looking to talk to women who would admit to being in their 30s. I wanted to ask them one question:

“Has your involvement in the spanking industry changed with age? If it’s has, do you think it has to do with your age, or experience, or changes in your personal preferences?”

I present to you the responses in the order that they were sent to me.

Miss Hunter, AKA The Hunteress, of Captured by the Hunteress

I’d say it has changed in some ways but not so much in others.  This is probably due to a number of factors, but mostly because of maturity!  Being in my early twenties when I started out, having no prior experience/desire of spanking and CP, I was totally naive about the whole thing.  I couldn’t believe there were so many people into it.

This amazement turned into fascination for me and after a few months I was completely hooked.  I can’t imagine my life without it now.  Now I’m producing my own content and managing my own website – that has been a major change for me.  It’s opened up a creative avenue/outlet for me which I always knew I had just wasn’t sure what to put it into.

Amelia-Jane Rutherford, AKA Ariel Anderssen of Restrained Elegance

My involvement in the spanking industry started fairly late; I guess that if I’d got involved when I was very young, I might have noticed more of a difference as I got older.  I certainly don’t feel as though I’ve ‘grown out’ of certain roles – I’ve always been aware that, being so tall, I don’t look like everyone’s idea of a of a submissive or bottom.  So I guess that from the outside I probably never have looked fabulously believable as a schoolgirl, but in my mind, I’m just as able to go to that place as I was five years ago.

Maybe I’m slightly less comfortable with certain roles now.  The ‘looked after by male relative while parents are away’  scenario feels a bit of a stretch; whereas I’ve grown in to feeling comfortable making movies where I play teachers, part of a married couple, or someone who starts the movie with a bit of authority.  That said, it all depends on who I’m working with – a really good Top can sort of make anything work, hoorah.

I’m beginning to think that I’m not ever going to discover the joy of switching, even though it seems to happen to loads of people who start off as bottoms.  I’m still definitely a bottom  and that’s quite reassuring to me, because I was worried when I started exploring spanking work (and play) that I might ‘use up’ my fetish through doing lots of it, and would lose this part of myself.  So I’m quite happy that my preferences are pretty much exactly the same as they were when I started spanking modelling.  I’ve learned to like things I didn’t know about, and have refined my fantasies a bit, but I still love the same things.

I suppose that it’s probably experience that’s made the biggest difference to me.  When I started, I was just desperate to do the things I’d been fantasising about all my life, and I wasn’t awfully fussy about things like safety, who the Top was going to be at a given shoot, or how hard the CP action was going to be.  As time has gone on, I’ve learned to think properly rather than turning a prospective shoot into a fantasy scenario; so I turn work down when I don’t think it’d produce something I’ll be proud of.  And I’d be a bit more likely to say if the action was too hard for me.  I hope.   Meeting the friendly community of CP models, producers and bloggers has been a lovely surprise, and has contributed to my no longer feeling guilty about being into spanking.  I still felt quite guilty, I think, when I started work as a spanking model.

So apart from bruising less, not much has changed.  And I’m really glad that my experience of this industry so far is that it allows for a much longer career than the mainstream modelling industry does.

Lucy McLean of Northern Spanking

I don’t think my actual physical involvement has changed all that much over the years.  I still do the same things now as I did many years ago in terms of writing, directing and editing films.  I still act like the mother-hen and smother the models who work with us with love and confidence – or at least I hope I do! But I did that at 24 as much as I do it now in my early thirties.  I don’t perform on camera as much as I used to, and certainly when I do, it tends to be only dominant roles, not submissive ones.  There are a few reasons for that, but it is mostly personal.  I find my submission a much more private affair these days, and I suspect that is a combination of getting older and my kinks evolving and changing quite dramatically over the last few years.  I very much enjoy the dominant roles I play on camera, but I think the reason I don’t sub any more is because I am not comfortable with exposing my vulnerability to the world in that way any more.  I found that much easier when I was younger for sure and I think I am much more reserved now than I was.  I’m not sure if this is a confidence issue.  In many ways I feel a lot more confident and self-assured as I have gotten older, so it may just have been bravado when I was younger!  However, in many ways I find my confidence knocked.

It’s fine and well KNOWING that people who make comment and judge your looks and performances who have never met you shouldn’t matter, but sadly even at my age negative comments still cut quite deep. There was one instance, in the last year or so, where I made a very rare on-camera performance alongside Amelia Jane, and we were both dressed as schoolgirls.  It was a cameo role and I wasn’t spanked in the film, but somewhere online someone commented on the trailer for the film that “the girl on the left (me) looks old enough to be my grandmother”.  Ouch.  Hurt even more by the fact that Amelia Jane and I are the same age! Though she is a truly stunning creature of near mythical beauty so it was probably quite foolish to put myself next to her in the first place, but still, it was possibly the worst thing I’ve ever seen written about me over the years.  I am usually pretty good at letting such things wash over me, but I am very conscious of getting older.  I think as a model it is much harder when you age because you are constantly surrounded by photographic and film evidence of you looking at your very best, of looking younger and one is much more aware of every wrinkle or line or sag than I suspect we would be normally.  For me personally, having a child this year has not helped my personal image or self-confidence.  I one day hope to make peace with aging and my body, but I do fear I may become a little obsessive about it the older I get.  Which makes me feel very sad.

The way I *feel* about the spanking film industry has changed, even though my physical involvement hasn’t changed that much.  I think this is a combination of experience, age and my personal preferences. (As well as the massive changes in the spanking industry over the years have an influence about how I feel and how I represent the industry too obviously – do not get me started on that!)

As I said, my own kinks have changed dramatically and that does influence the subject content of what I write and direct.  Of course it does.  I can still direct generic films for mass viewing pleasure.  But let’s face it, when you’ve been filming schoolgirl films for the best part of 10 years, it can get a little dull.  I have always tried to put my own personality into at least some of what we shoot, which is why we end up with off-the-wall projects like Wheatley Manor, Hot Fuzz, Strictly Come Spanking (and the eagerly anticipated Schoolgirls In Space).  However, to offset the crazy ones, there are also a small element of the films I shoot that are intensely personal. Films that give me chills when we shoot them and astonish me in edit.  7 years ago this would have been more D/s, heavy BDSM leaning spanking films.  Now it’s much more likely to be an honest, raw DD dynamic, or period pieces.  I could probably talk for pages and pages about this transition and how and why it happened.  But I won’t. I suspect this answer is already of epic essay proportions already! I don’t think my experience or age has changed things in a necessarily more positive or negative way.  It’s just different, that’s all.  And all of that is about evolution.  Evolving as a woman, as a person, as a mother, as a submissive and as a Director.  All equally valid in their contribution to changes, and being able to recognise and embrace those changes.  But that is what ageing and life is all about, right?

Thank you for doing this blitz-interview, girls.

From the all-caps brigade

This lovely comment got caught in my moderation queue, and I thought it needed to be brought to the attention of the wider audience. (It was left originally on a post with a film review):

MAY GOD BLESS ALL OF YOU FOR DOING SUCH A TERRIBLE SIN. ALL THE PRODUCERS AND EVERYONE WHO LOVE TO WATCH THIS KIND OF THING.
IF YOU THINK WHAT YOU HAVE DONE IS RIGHT, YOU ARE TOTALLY WORNG!
AND YOU PITY CRETURES WILL NOT WANT TO KNOW THE RESULT OF THIS SIN YOU HAVE TO GET.

Get it, you pity cretures? Bless you for sinning.

Pain tolerance and spanking modelling

Munchkins, what do we think about the importance of pain tolerance in spanking models?

I’ve been musing about the subject this week, because my own tolerance is not that great right now. I got a smacking with a fairly standard leather paddle the other day, and made so much fuss that the guy spanking me thought I was acting. (No, I wasn’t. I was sending honest signals about the level of pain I was experiencing.) Mind you, the presence of cameras seems to do wonders to my pain tolerance, shooting it straight up, but that’s not where my thoughts are at the moment.

In a normal spanking scene it’s the subjective level of pain that’s important. When I’m spanking somebody, I like to take them to a certain level of discomfort, far enough for them to think, “Ouchie! This smarts! My poor bottom!” How much force I have to use in order to get there, doesn’t really matter to me. It’s the reaction that feeds my sadism, not the energy I put into getting that reaction.

In films, the reaction is, obviously, very important. Yet, if not very much force is used, the film doesn’t look very dramatic. Canings, for example, usually look much, much milder on film than they feel. (I’ve watched couple of my NSI films thinking, “I’m sure that felt a lot harder than it looks like.”) So a model has to be able to take enough pain that, not only can she give authentic reactions, but also the action looks impressive.

Obviously, a model can stop the action whenever she likes. Nobody should have to take more than she’s comfortable with. At the same time, how annoying would it be to book a model only to find that her pain threshold is so low that she can’t produce more than a minute’s worth of film?

I’m glad that I’m not a spanking film producer, because my instinct would be to keep my models happy and bouncy. Pain tolerance snobbery makes me extremely uncomfortable, so I may end up with lots of very underwhelming movies.

You have to be able to take quite a lot of pain, even to work for the mildest companies out there, and that’s a fact of life.

Foreign shoots

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the speeded-up process of establishing intimacy at spanking shoots. What I didn’t talk about at the time was what a completely different experience it is to shoot abroad. (Caveat: my musings are based on the vast experience of whole two Lupus shoots. That’s as far as my international portfolio goes.)

The UK scene, as I mentioned, is really huggy and kissy, but this is only an amplification of what is a fairly huggy culture. In Eastern Europe physical contact is sparser: handshakes are the norm, even with friends; hugs are rare. This was true when I was growing up, and it appears to be true now, even with how the Western culture seeps eastwards.

When working in Eastern Europe, a language barrier is added to the natural reservedness: you can’t talk, they won’t hug. When you arrive on set, it’s easy to think that people just don’t like you very much. This is, of course, as wrong as thinking that the instantly affectionate UK people are struck by adoration as soon as they see you.

I wonder what the atmosphere is on set in other countries. I remember Pandora saying that when she went to hug the Pain4Fem guy after shooting a hard scene, he was nonplussed. Was this an Austrian trait, I wonder, or something he picked up shooting porn in Eastern Europe?

One day I hope to shoot some spankings in the US. I keep trying to imagine how different it might be from the UK, though I can’t really picture it. At least, there’s a language in common there, or very nearly…