More stairs: 12-step programs

Stairs again, because I’m working. It’s interesting that in horror movies, the monster is waiting at the top of the stairs. But in bdsm erotica, women get spanked or caned downstairs, while upstairs is a safe-ish sanctuary for the comfort of masturbation or post-punishment consolation sex.  

spanked stairs

stairs gbs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The walk of shame after punishment, up the stairs to (probably) sanctuary. So many iterations of this idea.

stairs gbs 2

The damage is done. Now there's just the climb up to her bedroom, with lotions and cool sheets.

The damage is done. Now there’s just the climb up to her bedroom, longing for lotions and cool sheets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

downstairs

See? Trouble happens at the bottom of stairs. It’s all business, headmaster’s offices, dungeons, studies with leather-topped desks, and kitchen tables down there.

No wonder these two girls ran into trouble…

I don’t know the photo-set this comes from, but it presumably involves a humiliating naked wait, then the caning or paddling, and finally being sent up to bed. 

Once they’re up those steps, everything will be fine. 

 

Finally, it’s a well-known fact that the shortest walk to the top of this building involves 1,665 steps. Gustave Eiffel really liked watching people climbing stairs.

eiffelA less well-known fact is that at the very top of the tower there’s a secret entrance that leads into a lavishly appointed bedroom for very fit perverts.

It’s called the Donjon Célestes (Aerial Dungeon). Instruments of pleasure and discomfort are supplied by an elderly lady who once hunted heretics for her Order, but now prefers more pleasant and temporary mortifications of the flesh.

That Maureen story: the WTF moment

I wrote a series of posts, “The shame of being a dom”, which included the story of Maureen. That story includes one completely WTF moment. We were discussing English literature because I was helping her with her assignment. Though it’s unwise to do this on a bed, naked, if you want to get any work done. 

I’d never made any bdsm approaches with her, not even something safe and mild like smacking her ass when she was about to come. She’d never had any bdsm experience of any kind, and, as far as she knew, any bdsm desires, dreams or fantasies. 

But still, this dialogue happened: 

Me: Well, you can say Milton’s Areopagitica is an ambivalent defence of free speech, and hey! you could link it to the Romantics’ idea that Satan was a sort of spirit of freedom. Must be at least 400 words in that. 

Maureen: Mmmm. I guess. So would you like to spank me? 

So, I thought at the time and afterwards, where the fuck did that come from? Why did she say that? I was glad she did say it, and the consequence was a relationship that turned out incredibly hot for both of us. But … why?

I asked her then and later, and she claimed she had no idea. She’d just thought it’d be something I liked. She never expected that she’d turn out to like it so much as well. 

I have one theory. I already had a library, a collection of books that followed me round from house to house, that was more than you could fit into a single car. (You’d need a couple of trucks, now. I know this, because when I left the city and moved up to the mountains, the books did take a couple of large trucks.) 

Why are these girls doing what they are doing, in this photograph? Charming, yes, but it is sexy?

Why are these girls doing what they are doing, in this photograph? Charming, yes, but it is sexy?

Anyway, one of my books was Les Jeux de Dames Cruelles, or The Games of cruel Women. This was a book of vintage erotic photographs, lithographs and postcards, which, despite the title, mainly featured cruel things being done to happy girls, not done by them. Though often it worked both ways: Fifi tied up Nanette, and took the cane to the poor girl’s helpless bottom. Maureen had really liked that book.

Vintage erotic photography has an odd effect. At one level its sexual charge is gone, because of all the differences of technology, and style – even when the models are naked, their hairstyles, the shape of their bodies, the way they pose their bodies – now seem awkward, and charming rather than sexy. “Look at her,” we might say, “quite a pretty girl, but does she really think that’s sexy?”

Anyway, Maureen noticed that the book fell open at certain places. She was right. There were some images I really liked, not because they were charming but because they were hot. She knew young men, and she knew that I’d held that book in one hand, and my cock in the other, and that explained the book’s tendency to open itself at the images that still held their sexual charge.

And so that’s how she knew that if she offered me her body, in submission, I would be most willing and overjoyed to take it. In my stylish and articulate way: 

Me: What? Uh, hrrrrrrm. Um-hrrrrrrm. Oh. Uh, yes. Yes, please. Absolutely. Yes.

Jerusalem Mortimer on Pinterest

I’ve got a Pinterest page. I pin selected mildly erotic pictures on it, which are mostly taken from this blog. 

I get the impression that Pinterest is a pretty chaste affair, so even though I’ve been selecting photos that don’t show genitals or fucking, I’m probably pushing the boundaries even by showing nipples. So my page may not be there forever.

But what struck me as interesting is this: it’s been going a few days, and it has five followers.  But it’s just photos taken from the internet with my wordy words removed. 

My blog, on the other hand, shows off maybe a million words, most of them organised and put into the right order by me, and it’s been going for nearly three years. Do you know how many followers this blog has? 

I’m sorry, but it’s none.

I know I have readers, so I’m happy: “fit audience find, though few”, and all that. You’re discerning people, all of you.

Still, my motley and random collection of light bdsm images is going to eat this blog alive. (Bangs head on desk.) Anyway, word fans, the real business is and will always be here. I’m about the words. 

If you want to look at the inoffensive Pinterest set, it’s here

 

Five Graves to Cairo

poster3I’ve got a thing for movies written by Billy Wilder. They tend to be brilliantly witty, and to pack in as much sexually subversive material as he could get away with. His films include age play, homosexuality, lesbian hints, cross-dressing, just off the top of my head. And it seems that almost every film he made included a spanking threat, which would be received with purring pleasure by the intended victim.   

Here’s the dialogue from one of his few non-comedy films, the World War II drama Five Graves to Cairo, featuring German supply dumps, Erich von Stroheim doing his arrogant Nazi schtick, heroic resistance fighters and a stranded British corporal. 

Anne Baxter is the heroic resister of all things German, who puts up relatively little resistance to the charms of the British chap played by Franchot Tone.  

 

hand it

Franchot Tone: If the circumstances we find ourselves in were not so extraordinary, I might turn you over my knee and spank you with abandon.

Anne Baxter: Thank you for your interest.

Franchot Tone: Not at all.

 

So polite. Since I saw this film I’ve been looking for an excuse to say Franchot Tone’s line to someone, but I haven’t found the right extraordinary circumstances, yet. 

The pride of being a dom

My mom would have insisted this was no way to treat a woman.

My mom would have insisted this was no way to treat a woman.

When I first started finding willing partners and doing bdsm I was worried about the apparent contradictions between being a dom, and having convictions about gender equality and strict rules against hitting women.

So I felt some shame about being a dom, and about my desires. 

But these days I’m absolutely shameless, even proud. Here are some key reasons why.

1   Respecting “yes”.

There’s still a duty of care even when someone says “yes”. Consent isn’t the only consideration you take into account. But if a submissive says, “hurt me, rule me, and fuck me when I’m crushed,” and that’s something you both want, then you have to respect the submissive’s right to consent and get what she wants.

(“She” wants? I thought about using inclusive pronouns, but that makes it sound as though I’m laying down universal rules. These are only my personal conclusions.)  

You can and should look out for your lovers, a duty that applies to submissives as much as to doms. Sometimes a submissive might beg for harder pain or tighter bonds because the moment is so good, and it may not always be safe and sensible to give her that. Still, unless you have a good safety concern, or it’s something that you personally don’t want to do (I won’t do scat or cut someone, for example, no matter how nicely the submissive might ask for it), you shouldn’t protect people from having their desires met.

 Respecting the “yes” as well as respecting no, and hard limits, is respecting the submissive.    

2   Respecting the power of sex

Hotness is good.

Hotness is good.

In my early bdsm career I was always troubled when I hurt a woman, even though she was a consenting submissive woman who loved the pain and wanted to be made to serve.

But I had the reassurance that came from the look on her face and the sounds she made when she came. I’d feel incredible pride in that.

And I knew the sexual joy (getting all William Blake-y here) that I’d just experienced. 

It’s a good idea to trust sexual pleasure when it’s mutual and strong. You can work out the intellectual issues later. 

3   Knowing yourself, and trusting yourself where you know you can

A lot of people think that bdsm must escalate, over time, as people supposedly get jaded and push out to further limits, so that one day, eventually, a spanker will be wanting to tear flesh with pincers, a la Sade.

Research has shown that this just isn’t true. People work up to the level of intensity that they’re comfortable with, and they stay there. That’s certainly been my experience.

Just before the grenades go off

Seconds before the grenades go off

Like everyone, I have a dark side.

For example, I’ve fantasised about throwing hand grenades into a Ku Klux Klan rally, leaving meat-spattered white sheets and groaning neo-Nazis crawling, blind with their own blood, on shattered, exposed bones across the dried-mud ground. Is that dark?

But my dark side doesn’t seem to have much to do with my dom side. 

Submissives have requested me to do things that are beyond my own usual limits, like drawing blood with a birch. I’ve told that story on this blog: look for the Vampire Girl tags. Another woman wanted me to use a wooden rod on her buttocks and thighs with all my strength, not judging or pulling the strokes, just going as hard as I could. 

Both times I found that my pleasure diminishes as I go further than I’m comfortable with. I can stretch a limit, but not far or for long.

So the monster in me isn’t hiding behind the dom. The dom loves giving pleasure through giving surrender. The monster seems to be hiding behind my politics, not my sexual desires.

Boo!

4   Know the submissive, and watch her

Watching submissives closely is important to keeping them safe, and keeping them happy in that bdsm way that is mostly but not entirely sexual. Luckily, I’m turned on by submission, when a woman I desire submits to me, so I can watch a submissive being submissive, all day. 

Close communion comes from close observation. Close observation also tells me, as a dom, whether I’m doing good and not harm. And when I know I’m doing well and doing good, I can feel proud of it.

5   Respecting dominance

I know that I put a lot of work into domming. Regardless of how people interpret the dynamics of what happens between dominant and submissive, I know that I do more, I make more judgment calls, and the chances are that she will come quite a lot more often than me. 

(On a particular occasion I might, for example, come in her mouth and refuse her permission to come. But it tends to work out in her favour on average, over a period of time.) 

She gets to go into subspace when she finds the way, and though I know there’s a dom equivalent, I can’t allow myself to go there in a session. I need to stay alert, observant and active. There’s a degree of illusion-making, of legerdemain, in domming, where we give the submissive the pleasure of feeling that she is powerless and she serves, and she is not served. Providing that illusion involves skill and work and art. I am, submissive madam, your most arrogant servant.  

lovinI still think submission is a gift given to a dom. There are people who making barfing noises whenever someone says this, but it seems to me to be true.

I find the level of trust and generosity involved in giving someone submission is, ahem, moving and beautiful. 

At the same time, while a submissive gives a dominant one vast gift, a dominant gives a submissive many smaller gifts, which come down to forcing on her the things she most desires. 

So dominants have our own form of generosity. It took me a while to learn that and respect it, but that’s because I’m slow. 

Sing if you’re proud to be a dom, sing if you think it’s da bomb

swaggerSo it took me a while to work it all through, but these days I’m rather proud to be a dom. I enjoy it, and I can make a girl cry (another absolute taboo when I started) with a song in my heart and a smile on my lips. 

I don’t think I’ll ever want to take part in a Dom Pride march, though. Oh my dears, the swaggering.

The shame of being a dom 9

Maureen said, “You change, you know. Most of the time you’re all sensitive and thoughtful, and that’s cool. I like that, most of the time. But I like what this does to you. You get really hard. Not just your cock, you moron. Everything gets hard, everything you do. I like you being like that. And once I get excited, I don’t want you to go easy on me. You know that force that takes over? You know what I mean?”

arty bdsmThat force. There’s a kind of rushing in my ears when I’m domming and it’s going really well. I said, “I don’t know what that is. Don’t know how it works. But yes: there it is.”

“And it feels good. I feel weird, saying that. I really am a traitor. I don’t want to stop doing this either. It’s just hard to understand.”

I ate a piece of her quiche, by way of being ruthless and hard. And then we talked about other things, and had a gentler kind of sex.

 

So I had consent, but consent isn’t everything. You still have duties of care for the person in bed with you that go far beyond what you can get them to agree to.

Still, Maureen’s consent, her sexual response, and her relatively calm acceptance afterwards, were enough to let me continue.

I still had some doubts, but there was also the fact that hurting Maureen had itself been sex, and it merged into the best fucking I’d ever had. And she’d screamed, coming, like she never had before. With me, anyway, but I suspected it was ever. So I followed my cock, or my whole body, really. I took things further. 

Future posts

Posts planned for the next couple of weeks. 

1  Finishing off the thoughts about domming and shame;

2  A piece about the sexual overtones of corporal punishment in schools, and how it has linked with and led to child rape, and why those countries (eg the US) that haven’t banned it yet should get their shit together and ban it now;

3  The story of Eloise and Abelard, as bdsm love story; 

4  Because Eloise and Abelard is, genuinely and historically, a semi-consensual turned fully consensual schoolgirl spanking story, I’ll finish off the schoolgirl spanking story involving “Cindy”, just for the sake of writing something hot and uncomplicated. 

And that’ll hold us for a while. I thought I’d managed to drive my cold off, but it’s back with a vengeance, and I’m off to bed.

Toothpaste on the clitoris: follow-up 2

At about 12 minutes of toothpaste clitoral sensation, Lisa was not keeping herself still, and she got paddled as I’d promised. 

Floaty!

Floaty!

The paddling turned out to make it easier for her, because after a few swats she seemed to be overwhelmed with sensual information – if you can call the impact of a paddle “information” – and she just held herself in position and let things happen. Everything went wet and warm and floaty.

The toothpaste seemed to lose its heat, or just quieten down to being a bit warm and not uncomfortable, after about half an hour.

Obviously the timing will vary according to the kind of toothpaste, the woman’s pain threshold, how lubricated she was when the toothpaste was applied, plus random factors like mood and timing and, well, chance. 

I scooped off the toothpaste with my tongue, because it felt like a good idea, and the toothpaste on clitoris experience segued into other things. 

Afterwards, Lisa rated it higher than I did. The combination of clitoral heat-torture plus the paddle was a memory she used when she was masturbating, later. That’s high praise. From my point of view both the application and the removal were fun, and forcing her to keep still and dealing with the inevitable failure were hot, but I’d rate the whole toothpaste thing only as a B. 

Figging, with a peeled piece of ginger root inserted into the anus, is something I’d rate as an A. Maybe that’s just because the ginger root is organic while toothpaste is more artificial, and me, I’m a country boy at heart. Figging also seems to have a slower build-up of heat and a longer effect. Maybe I prefer figging because I can absolutely slather my cock with cold cream and bugger her afterwards, knowing that the cold cream is a delicious relief after the ginger.   

So I’d rate toothpasting, if that’s what we’re going to call it, as a modest success. I’m glad to have it in my repertoire, but it didn’t change my life. (Or Lisa’s.)

Toothpaste on the clitoris: a follow-up

Back on April 4, 2013, I said I was going to apply toothpaste to the clitoris of a wriggly submissive women next week, and report back on the results. Well, I keep my promises. It’s just that sometimes (sometimes!) it takes me 17 months. 

So, the woman was called Lisa (which means she wasn’t called Lisa, but she will be here), and she’d been promised toothpaste. Not as a punishment, just as an experience. She was curious and excited, but also nervous, which was good. She undressed and stood with her hands behind her back and her feet apart while I explained the ground rules.

The safe word was “toothbrush,” if she really couldn’t stand it or she thought she was coming to harm.

"Keep still, girl."

“Keep still, girl.”

Otherwise she had to stand still, with her legs apart, and her hands resting on the back of a wooden chair for support. If she started wriggling, waggling or thrusting, I’d enjoy watching her, but I’d also punish her for it with the leather paddle.

She’d be paddled in the bent over and touching her toes position, with her feet apart, so that she couldn’t press herself against anything that might be comforting. There’d be a minimum of six strokes, but the paddling would only stop if she managed to keep completely still. 

I didn’t tell her that I was going to paddle her regardless, because I expected that she’d enjoy the two heats, one from her clitoris and one from her bottom, and the way they met and merged. But she knew that.

They seemed like good rules, and Lisa didn’t even bother to complain I was being unfair. So she lay back on the bed with her knees up and apart, and her feet on the edge of the bed.

I licked her until she starting breathing in the way that meant she was thinking about coming. I stopped abruptly when she caught her breath and tightened her stomach muscles. The point of no return was getting close.

"Open wide..." Actually, fingers are better than brushes, for getting toothpaste onto slippery surfaces.

“Open wide…” Actually, fingers are better than brushes, for getting toothpaste onto slippery surfaces.

I coated toothpaste all round the sides of her clit, dabbed a dollop on the tip, and then pressed it down and spread it.

The toothpaste was a slightly green colour, so it looked like she was wearing a little turquoise jewel on her cunt.

She got off the bed, and took up her position, standing straight, with her feet well apart and her hands on the back of the chair. The toothpaste had been on her clit for about five  minutes, and it was, apparently, pleasantly warm.

At eight minutes she made a little, worried sound, and there was a muscle all a-tremble on her left inner thigh.

I wasn’t going to punish her for that. I waited.

Note:

The next episode is here