Author Archives: jaime

Intermission: On not being led into temptation

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A man wrote to ask if I’d train his wife while he watched. It just wouldn’t work, for me. Actually, the request was a one-liner, unaccompanied by any information about him or his wife, or even, since I’m a shallow soul, a picture of this trainable wife of his. So this wouldn’t be tempting in the specific case even if the idea was tempting in general.

But even if his wife looked like Scarlett Johansson and he’d written a letter as charming and voluble as Cary Grant, it still wouldn’t be tempting.   

It’s that bdsm has to be personal, for me anyway. Even when it’s casual and between me and a woman I’ve never met before and may well never meet again, it’s still personal. The focus and the energy has to be between the dominant and the submissive or it’s not really there. 

Intermission: Betty Boop (boop a doop)

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Paramount announced on 23 March 2012 that they’re finally going to release all the original Betty Boop cartoon films made in the 1930s. (That’s all of them; she made her debut in 1930, and her final film in 1939.) It’s about time. 

Pirate girls: Jessica in bondage, Betty as dominatrix

Betty Boop’s interesting because she was just about the only animated cartoon woman to be sexy, 58 years before Jessica Rabbit. And though she was never promoted by a company with the power and reach of Disney, who squeezed every buck (and all the character) out of the Mouse and the Duck, she’s probably more popular right now. And a hell of a lot cooler.

Betty, not blue. 82 years old, and in better shape than Mickey and Donald

Part of the reason that the owners of her image seem to have tried to bury her is that she was always a bit sexier than the studios were comfortable with. So the studios sulked while Betty and her fans went out to play together.

The Betty Boop revival wasn’t driven by the people who own her image. Lions Gate Entertainment isn’t producing any new Betty Boop product. In fact Betty Boop hasn’t been seen in a movie since she turned up for a few seconds in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Her last film before that was in 1939. (There were a couple of crap TV specials, which we’re going to ignore.)

But studios can’t hide her, or clean her up. In her later cartoons she wore more, and played with pets rather than men; they dumbed her down and they domesticated her. Somehow it never took. She remained Max Fleischer’s original and independent creation, Betty Boop the little sexpot with a taste for surrealism. People who’ve never seen a Betty Boop movie still know that she’s a bad girl. A bad girl with a heart of golden mush, and defiantly sexy.

But even the “official” Betty enjoyed the company of disciplinarians
Pirate Betty reveals a taste for light discipline.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You do get Japanese knock-offs that only exploit her cuteness, giving us a Hello Kitty version of the Boop. But generally she’s still about sex, often with a slightly fetishy flavour.

Betty in bondage

There’s her knowing echoing of Marlon Brando’s famous bike and leathers pose from The Wild One, the tee-shirts of her saying “If you’re going to ride my ass, you could at least pull my hair”, and the tee-shirts and posters showing her in bondage, or posing as a dominatrix.Though the original, official Betty products occasionally had her tied up, too. 

Somehow she’s refused to go away, or let her owners change her. Sure, she’s a male creation, and you could go all deconstructive on her excellent ass; but her feistiness (weird word that, or what?) was real. For example, the first Hollywood film to raise the issue of workplace sexual harassment was a Betty Boop short. More importantly, she was one of the sexiest women ever to have been made entirely of ink and pixels.  

Intermission: key words in bdsm writing

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The next episode in the tawse saga will be the meeting with Gemma.

But before I write about that I should explain who Gemma is, and that’ll be a saga in itself. Let’s have a few short stand-alone posts first, as an intermission. This one’s about key words in bdsm writing.

As a child, I’d look through books that looked as if they might possibly contain a bdsm scene. I’d skim books under the shopkeeper’s eye, so I had to scan each book quickly. Given that bdsm scenes in mainstream books exist but are rare, my strike rate was surprisingly good. So good that I used to wonder how I was doing it.

I realised that was using certain words as my indicators. If you see one of these words, check the page on which they appear. I hadn’t consciously made a list of key words, but I’d created one anyway. The central list of bdsm indicator words was something like this:

quiver, thighs, damp, plump, bare, moist, sir, strap, smack, mistress, girl [as form of address], sobbed, quavered, kneel, bend, firm, reddened, buttocks, proud, humbled, stripe, swish, schoolgirl, plimsol, upturned, presented, disobedient, lowered, raised, serve, tied, wrists, cords, cuffs, sorry, rosy, master, cane.

It’s amazing how good the eye and brain is at detecting words in a blur of skimmed text. It’s like that effect where you can hear your own name mentioned at a party, where you didn’t think you could make out a word anyone was saying. All you have to do is be interested. 

Work: and cabinets/cabinettes

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Sorry, I’m working, and that’s going to have to be the priority. The tawse story gets interesting, since it has sex, sound effects and reflections on how reality isn’t much like pornotopia, but it’s more fun to live in.

Cabin boy, or possibly cabinette. Let's call her ... Roger.

Anyway, watch this space. We’ll get under way, or weigh, later. I think under weigh was the original form, and had to do with weighing anchor before you can set sail; but the only thing I know about sailing ships is that if I were a ship’s captain in pornotopia, I’d be birching the cabin boy for, oh, stealing rum, when, after some especially frantic wriggling on the culpit’s part it turned out that the boy was a girl stowaway, who … (continued page 197 of the web)

Back to work, though, for me. I’ll get back to my story when I can come up for air. 

Not the tawse’s tale: Talking about the weather

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It’s late at night. There have been storms. A pine tree outside my back window was struck by lightning. It’s a big tree, a high as a four or five story building. I want to build a tree house towards the top, and use it to observe comet showers. The lightning hit about two thirds of the way up the tree, and big, thick, hard scars of bark exploded in all directions: in the pool, all over the lawn, onto the balcony where I have breakfast when it’s warm enough.

The tree caught alight, with great yellow-red gouts of flame, but fortunately it was raining so hard that it soon put the fire out. But you could smell it smouldering for a day or two. 

I’d dealt with that, and then on Wednesday night there was a wind storm. The gale howled as if someone was trying to push the Arctic through power pylons: that humming of wire and shrilling of air, the coldest sound on earth. I fell deeply asleep, since it’s good to be warm when that is happening. But in the morning, a huge oak had split in half, and the half that fell had landed, spectacularly, in the swimming pool, breaking the pool cover I’d made. It must have been extraordinarily loud, but I didn’t hear a thing. 

Today I finished the job of turning the fallen tree into pieces that will fit in the living room fireplace. Which is good, because just after I finished, and moved on to cutting up some other logs, the chain on my chainsaw twisted, and it’s now kinked out of shape. I’ll have to try to fix it, taking out a couple of links while I’m about it.

Anyway, I was going to continue the story of the tawse. But it’ll have to start tomorrow. It’s bedtime.