Details

Some girls are just bendy everywhere

In bdsm, details matter immensely. A session is as intricate as a Japanese tea eremony.

Must the submissive keep his or her mouth open, or closed? Stand on tip toes, or pigeon-toed; both make them more vulnerable, but in different ways. Does a submissive woman, pleasuring her master, bend at her knees, or keep her legs straight and bend at the waist.

I’m in Nova Scotia today. A family wedding in the icy wind. I’ve got the choice of going dressed as Wyatt Earp or David Hume. That’s the choice for reasons too complex to explain here. I think I’ll go Hume. It’s more colourful.

A cage song, and stillness in bdsm

This really is a robin redbreast in a cage. His name is Bugsy, and he's an orphan. His breast will get redder when he gets a little older. A few days after this photo was taken, he flew away.

This really is a robin redbreast in a cage. His name’s Bugsy, and he’s an orphan. His breast will get redder when he gets a little older. He was released a few days after this photo was taken.

A robin redbreast in a cage

Puts all heaven in a rage;

But birds, impervious to command,

Captivity can’t understand;

When you knelt, bound, so meek and still,

Unfreedom was your own free will;

My iron embrace was your delight;

Your body held, your mind took flight.

I do not think the heavens resented

Submissiveness so sweet presented.

 

 

Sorry for starting this poem with Blake lines and then continuing with mine. It’s like sticking another ‘tache on the Mona Lisa, isn’t it? Except that it’s meant respectfully. It may even be so, just as giving unfreedom can be an act of love..

One day I’ll write something about the woman who inspired this poem. She liked cages. My engagement with cages is specific to her and my relationship. I’d never used one before, and haven’t since. They’re not calling me, so unless I get a hint from a charming submissive woman to the effect that she thinks she’d look cute behind bars, it may stay specific to that one relationship. I did enjoy it. 

But this poem was about her stillness, when she was waiting in her cage for me to “notice” her. In her mind – you know how doms and subs know these things, even when they’re not said – she was a captive, abducted from a beach or a railway station, trained to wait, neatly ready for her captor’s pleasure, and to be put away again, like a toy, after use. She was not meek, even when submitting, but she liked the thought of being meek.

hisagain1I was going to post something more explicit about pleasure and power today, but I’ve been out digging and unblocking drains, because of a sudden and heavy rainstorm, dumping more water against the walls of the house than the drains and gutters could handle. 

I think I’ve headed the water off. Reaching down to where metal pipe meets ag pipe, about 18 inches below the ground. The rain down my back and between my buttocks while I pulled out the Japanese maple roots that were causing the blockage. If that means nothing to you, you’re lucky.  

On the other hand, the sudden GAWP! sound when you’re cleared it and the water starts to drain is good.

But I’m soaked and freezing. Now I’m for a hot bath and a cup of coffee with a drop of rum. 

Steamy sex will have to  be posted later. 

An Arabian Night #2

The answer us that it sounds exactly like an Arabian Night.

But really it’s a Parisian night, from the early twentieth century, put into English a little later by a London-based Welshman, Edward Powys Mathers.

Mathers’s version is probably still the most popular English-language version of “The Thousand Nights and a Night”. But he didn’t know a word of Arabic. He translated the French version by Joseph Charles Mardrus.

Chaste, though naked, athletics, as in the original Arabic version

Mardrus knew Arabic, but he also wrote his own mildly erotic Oriental fantasies, like his “The Queen of Sheba”, which is all gold costumes (underwear that goes “clank” when you drop it), yearning glances and shuddering thighs. Then in the early 1920s, Mathers did an English version of Mardrus’s French. The original is two generations away from the English version.

I discovered all this when I went searching for other translations of the Princess Abrixa scene when I was researching my “Between the Lines”. “Between the Lines” among other things tries to sketch in a cultural history of bdsm. I wanted to show that there’s awareness of bdsm pleasures in pretty much all world literatures, not just the European ones. But when I checked the Burton translation, the bound and spanked girls weren’t there. There were only some chaste athletic competitions.

Disgruntled slavegirls demand to be in the sexier French/English version. (Painting: Giulio Rosati)

So I checked other translations, and discovered that the bondage and spanking doesn’t appear in any other translation. Mardrus and Mathers had made it up. Well, the athletics was probably enough to keep Sharkhan happily watching, hiding in his tree, but it isn’t quite so saucy for the reader. Mardrus and Mathers knew what an Arabian night ought to be like, even if the original Arabic writer didn’t.

I fixed the immediate problem for my book by  dropping the “Arabian Nights” reference, and substituting some early medieval Arabic medical texts that showed some awareness of bdsm, or at least of sexual responses to whipping. But it was a pity to have to lose that warm, all-girl spanking night by the pool.

An Arabian night #1

I’m going to interrupt the tawse story for a moment or two.

In my edition of “The Thousand Nights and a Night”, there’s a playful bondage and discipline scene early in “The Adventure of King Omar al-Nenan and his son Sharkhan”.

The young Prince Sharkhan is beside a pool when he sees a group of beautiful girls approaching. So, as you would, he climbs a tree so he can hide and watch them. This is most rewarding, because it is the beautiful Princess Abriza, with a retinue of serving girls almost as beautiful. And they undress and slip into the water, which runs sleekly over their peach-firm, lion-brown breasts, bellies and buttocks, their soft thighs and their sacral dimples.

Sharkhan is a happy man, though not a gentleman.

Then the beautiful and naked Princess, tiring of her beautiful and naked maidens’ silly chatter, threatens to tie them up and spank their bottoms with her belt, one by one. By one, by one. Having delivered the threat, she makes good on it. Let’s say there were a dozen serving girls. It must have taken ages.

"Like this, Princess?" Both paintings by the wonderful Etienne Dinet.

So the scene is one of spanked, mildly flushed servant girls in one heap, and an orderly queue of unspanked girls waiting for the Princess to get to them. The sound is all girlish squealing, the slap of leather on sun-warmed serving-girl buttocks, and an oddly human sighing sound coming from the tree above them. As for the scent … It must have been a nice place to be, though I doubt Prince Sharkhan was feeling comfortable.

That sounds like an Arabian night, doesn’t it?

(Answer tomorrow.)

The tawse tale #1

This is part of the excellent, steamy, funny and insightful novel “The Tale of the Tawse”

Because that novel’s about to be published, the early drafts have to come off the net. Publishers don’t like competition from free providers.

Once it’s published, the address for buying this will be uploaded here.

Day in the garden

It’s been a virtuous day in the mountains. I’ve been mowing, mulching, chain-sawing and pool-vacuuming.

The pool-vacuuming, especially, should be a porn film scenario. The maid comes out, is supposed to net all the leaves, and takes off her cossie and plunges in instead. Then she gets spanked by an actor so bad he could have been in the original Star Trek. The end. I could do it, but I’d have to practice my Cherman accent.

They’re doing it wrong.

But there was no pool porn, just me and my, ahem, hose and scrubber. I was mildly sad because a frog had got in and died there after a few laps, because chlorined pools are a bad decision for a frog, and he couldn’t get up the pool walls.

I’ll have to make a little ladder. Anyway, I’m ready for a shower and out for dinner shortly.

So I’ll have to start the tale of the tawse tomorrow.

Welcome, readers, nice to see people dropping by. And because of the kind of day I’ve had, I’ll leave you with a picture of a wheelbarrow.

 

Burns of love #3

Traditionally, your pornographic tawsing goes something like this:

“After supper came those terrible two dozen with the tawse. the tawse is a Scottish instrument of punishment, made of a hard and seasoned piece of leather about two feet long, narrow in the handle and at the other end about four inches broad, cut into narrow strips from about six to nine inches in length.

Alice had never seen, much less felt one.

She was commanded to bring it to her uncle, and had to go for it naked – not even a fan was allowed! How could she conceal the least of her emotions? Oh, this nakedness was an awful, awful thing!

She brought it, and opened her book and knelt down and said:

“Please give me two dozen with the tawse for being ashamed and trying to cover my nakedness, and for my disobedience.”

“Across my knee.”

“Across – your – knee.”

“Very well! Get up. Stand sideways close up to me. Now,” taking the tawse in his right hand and putting his left arm round her waist, “lean right down, your head on the carpet, miss,” and holding her legs with his left leg, he slowly and deliberately laid on her sore bottom two dozen well-applied stripes. Then he let her go and she rolled sprawling on the carpet with pain and exhaustion.”

The first time I used a tawse, on a 21st century girl, it was quite a bit less efficient than that. Story for next time, I guess.