Schoolgirl spanking stories and sexual politics 10

Posted on September 1, 2014 by jaime

It’s a cold morning. Vicious wind and sheets of rain. There’s a group of schoolgirls in pleated school uniform skirts, waiting for the bus. They’re stamping and rubbing their hands. They’re freezing. A pleated skirt and a blazer over a cotton shirt aren’t nearly enough to keep the cold out.

But the Christian school they go to has a uniform and they have to wear it. They’re not allowed to wear sensible clothes for the weather conditions.

Just behind their bus shelter there’s a strip joint. It closed for the night about four hours ago, a little after three in the morning. But there are enormous paintings on the front of the building to show the punters and pedestrians what you get for your entrance fee, or membership.

So there’s a woman in a nurse’s uniform, leaning forward to show off the considerable heft of her breasts. Because, you know, nurses.

Beside her there’s an equally huge painting of a schoolgirl with an even more improbable body. She’s bending forward to present her arse to the street so the wind can blow her little pleated skirt up and show off her little white knickers, and she’s turning round to gaze at the rosy spectacle of her own arse, giving the viewer a red-lip-sticked O of surprise and a vista of her improbable breasts.

To flash both her ass and her tits that way, she’d have to have her spine made out of the same stuff as Linda Blair’s neck in The Exorcist. If she wasn’t a painting she’d be in traction for years, poor thing.

The real schoolgirls in front of that image never look behind them. That image and the word “Schoolgirls!” has been there for years. There’ve been schoolgirls waiting at that bus-stop in front of that sign for years. It probably feels like they’ve been waiting for that morning’s bus for years. The sign’s always been there.

But they don’t look at it. It’s there.

Traditional sexual consent vs bdsm consent

Posted on August 31, 2014 by jaime

When I was growing up I didn’t know any other people who had bdsm dreams and desires. I wasn’t sure if there even were any girls into bdsm in the whole world, and I was certain that there weren’t any in the farming town I grew up in. So getting consent to do bdsm-y sexual things wasn’t even an issue for me. But at least there were girls who liked sex, so I did learn the traditional script for getting consent for non-bdsm sex.

It’s a sexually asymmetrical script. That is, it’s sexist. A woman is supposed to give subtle, non-verbal signals of her interest in a man. Things that seem obvious to her, that men hardly ever even notice. A man is allowed to show sexual interest more openly.

He can gaze at a woman, make compliments, stand close to her, try to make himself helpful if she’s doing something, talk and listen to her answers, and try to be clever and funny. He’s supposed to monitor the response, not that she has to make one.

If she frowns, freezes, calls someone else over, changes the subject to something dull, sighs, looks bored, turns away, then he should go away. But if he seems to be being smiled at, he can continue. Eventually he can touch her hand, or her waist or shoulder, though avoiding areas of the body that are marked as sexual.

If she seems comfortable with that “casual” touch, he might stay with that for a time. When it seems natural, which might be a minute later but it might be days, he can try to kiss her. He’s supposed to keep his hands somewhere neutral, and leave space to back out if the kiss isn’t well received.

Ah, the universal language of flowers. Usually they say, “sorry, I spent the afternoon fucking someone else, and I feel a bit bad about that, so here’s some flowers.” Note: flowers mostly won’t get you laid, but they are good for whipping breasts.

She doesn’t have to say anything, because she doesn’t have to acknowledge that anything is happening. If she’s not pleased, she can withdraw her body, or her warmth, or tell him to fuck off. If any of those things happen he should say sorry and back away. If there are no signals either way, the man will probably pause, then move forward carefully. If he seems still to be getting smiles, then he can try for an open mouth kiss with his hand touching sexual areas: her ass, a breast. That also might happen seconds later, or days.

If that’s well received then sexual consent is usually assumed, though the man can lose consent by doing something stupid and off-putting. From that point the woman can withdraw consent, but she has to be explicit about doing so. That’s the version I was taught by girls and, I suppose, my parents. There’s another version of the script in which the woman isn’t allowed to withdraw consent once she’s shown any sort of keenness. It’s a script that doesn’t have much trouble turning rapey.

The man who’s advanced to this point and been accepted no longer has a moral right to stop. For a man to bow out at this stage, within this script, is nasty, hurtful and humiliating behavior.

These scripts are like dancing, because they allow creative variations, and some people can perform them gracefully while others are crap at them. Still, they’re based on the idea that women shouldn’t want and shouldn’t be able to show sexual interest or desire too quickly or easily, or too openly.

In the script’s harshest forms a woman only has the right to be silent or else to stop a man’s advance, and a man may have moved from eye contact to sexual touching with nothing more than her inaction as his indication of consent. The script maximizes opportunities for men and women to misunderstand each other and hurt each other. It seems designed to create misunderstanding.

When I was a child, before I knew about this script, I’d assumed that men and women would be frank with each other about their sexual interest or lack of it. A woman or a man would plainly declare their interest and the other person would give them an honest and open response. If they were both interested, they’d talk about what they wanted and then get on with it, doing their best to find and give pleasure as they’d agreed.

Yeah, what a silly idea. But the funny thing is that this is pretty much how consent is negotiated in bdsm. People who enjoy bdsm generally avoid ambiguity over sexual desire and intentions.

This may be because we’re usually more specific about the kind of partner we’re looking for. We usually prefer one sex and some specifications about appearance, as non-bdsm people do, but as well as that we’re usually looking for a dominant or submissive partner in particular, and within that group we’re looking for someone prefers the specific practices that we like, and to roughly the same degree of intensity.

Also, the consequences of miscommunication can be greater in bdsm. So in bdsm courtship people tend to be explicit about what they want and who they want it with.

Even before I knew the rules of bdsm courtship, I knew that I kind of disapproved of the rules of non-bdsm courtship. The bdsm world seems to have taken a far less sexist approach, and a much more ethical one.

That is, it’s better in principle. Assholes, liars, manipulators, nutters and rapists can still misuse any system, but at least in bdsm the ground rules are fairer and clearer.

What do people think?

50 Shades, Nine and a Half Weeks, and bdsm exploitation

Posted on August 8, 2014 by jaime

So there’s a film of 50 Shades of Grey coming out. Not many people on the bdsm world seem to be especially happy about this. Well, based on the trailers, it does look kind of crap.

The 1980s Mickey Rourke, and Kim Basinger's hair.

The 1980s Mickey Rourke, and Kim Basinger’s amazing acting hair.

I recently saw Nine and a Half Weeks, though, which was made in the 1980s, when Mickey Rourke was a good-looking, promising young actor. If you compare the 1980s film based on a bdsm book with the 2014 film based on a bdsm book, it suggests that there actually has been a tiny bit of progress.

Though it was based on a mildly scandalous bdsm novel, the 9 1/2 Weeks film had no bdsm in it whatsoever. On the other hand, in one of the 50 Shades trailers, Dakota Channing does get tied up, and at one point she has a riding crop waved at her, though it doesn’t actually come into contact with her skin. Maybe they’re saving that for the movie. So at least there’s a miniscule dose of bdsm. But on the evidence so far, the only thing that actually gets tortured is the song Wicked Game.

So there’s progress. From no bdsm at all in the 1980s bdsm film, to a tiny, homeopathic amount of bdsm in the 2014 bdsm film. Actually, unless you thought pouring the contents of your fridge onto Kim Basinger might be sexy, there wasn’t any sex in the 9 1/2 Weeks film either.

Which was a pity in a way, because the book that the film was based on was reasonably competently written. The book, 9 1/2 Weeks, was about bdsm, and it did have a couple of sexy scenes in it. Unlike the movie.

But even the 9 1/2 Weeks book is kind of annoying, because it presents bdsm as a pathology. The dom was fucked up from the beginning (Aspergers plus obsessive-compulsive traits plus psychopathology) and the submissive woman progressively lost the ability to do anything for herself, even brush her own hair. She even had to spend time in psychiatric recuperation after the horror of her actually quite mildly sexy experience.

That is, in the best tradition of the exploitation novels and films of, oh, 1930 to, well, now, the woman character goes off the rails of proper decent normality after a few introductory scenes. The reader or the audience gets treated to the promise (not always actually delivered) of some outre sex scenes, and then at the end the heroine comes back to the straight and narrow world. This is important, so that nobody’s ideas are ever actually challenged.

(Jenny Diski’s first novel, Nothing Natural, was one of those, too.)

Bend over, dollface.

I gave up on 50 Shades after reading a few excerpts on-line. There were sentences like, “Oh my god, he’s spanking me!” Though I treasure this one: “Pulling off his boxer briefs, his erect penis springs free. Holy cow!” *

Based on the bits I’ve read – supposedly the sex scenes – I’d say it’d have read better if it was entirely in text-speak.

On the other hand, if you figure that bdsm is roughly where homosexuality was in the 1950s in terms of social acceptability, then visibility in crappy exploitation books and films (that promise more exploitation scenes than they deliver) is one of the stages that we’re just going to have to live through.

Still, one day someone will make a decent bdsm date movie, a rom-com with canes and nipple-clips.

* According to that sentence, Christian Grey’s penis pulled off his boxer briefs for him. I wish I could train my cock to do that for me. I could stand there doing the Charles Atlas pose, or make a paper airplane, while my cock does all the work.

But the thing I really love is that once the penis gets its kit off, she looks at it and thinks, “Holy cow!”

Don’t leave us in suspense, woman: what the hell is wrong with that penis?

Nailed it for the cameras

Posted on July 22, 2014 by jaime

I read in Fortean Times (“so it must be true”) that a few years back a group of those Philippine Christian worshippers who have themselves nailed to crosses at Easter time were pleased, at first, to see that they’d been joined by a young Japanese man.

Crucifixion season in the Phillippines. More painful than Civil War re-enactments?

Crucifixion season in the Phillippines. As painful as Civil War re-enactments?

He, like them, was dressed in a loincloth, and he had real nine-inch nails driven through his hands and feet to keep him up there. So they thought he was a Japanese Christian, and he, like them, was there to share an experience with the late Jesus, and thereby acquire some of his holiness.

They wondered a bit, though, about the make-up and the film crew. And they weren’t pleased at all when they discovered that he was a Japanese bondage film star, and he was shooting a porno.

Every action that they took, he took too. The only difference between them was the narrative inside their heads about the meaning of they were doing.

It’s a parable.

A new Dom asked me for advice

Posted on April 15, 2014 by jaime

Why I wrote this

A woman I know has found a new Dom, who hasn’t had any bdsm experience. He’s finding it hard to find the half-way point between martial arts levels of discipline and being too light. He asked me to give him some counsel, and I wrote him this.

1 Know how happy and amazed you should be

The trust and love of a submissive woman is pretty much the best thing in the world. You’re incredibly lucky and privileged to be well on the road to having it. At the same time, for your sake and hers, it’s important that she feels privileged to have such a strict but loving dom.

Now, she’s going to give you some rights over her that most women would be shocked to grant to a man. Her body becomes yours, to enjoy as you will. And you have the right to discipline her. The sensations that come from giving that kind of – sometimes painful – guidance and correction when she misbehaves, can be very intense.

2 You have duties

But you can’t ever forget what she’s giving you those rights for. She expects and wants certain things from you, including safety, a feeling of being loved and cared for, pleasure, and having enough leeway to be frilly and silly, and she needs fun and mischief. You want to enjoy her submission, and that’s only going to work in the longer term if she’s a happy girl.

So, she may surrender all her power to you, but there’s still a quid pro quo. You could spend an hour in which she sucks your cock, while you teach her how you like that done, and use the crop across her arse if she’s not enthusiastic enough. Theoretically you could keep that going for an evening, with a noticeable drop-off in enthusiasm but probably without too much complaint. Two evenings in a row, and you’re going to have a sulky girl who’s less fun to be around.

I’m not sure at what point she’d slam her door, with you on the outside of that door, but that point would come.

The point is that for all you’re in charge, and she’s surrendered to you, if you don’t meet her needs then eventually things won’t work so well.

3 Discipline and a submissive girl

That brings us to discipline. It’s an important thing between a dom and his submissive. It’s one of the most important ways in which the dom sets limits for her, and establishes that those boundaries can’t be crossed without consequences. She will be happier with limits, and happy that you care enough to monitor whether she stays within them. Sometimes she won’t be very happy at all, while the punishment is proceeding. But your goal should be to make sure she can be happy shortly afterwards.

If she can be cheeky to you, within half an hour of getting the cane, then you’ve done well.

Why do you want her to be able to be cheeky to you? It’s because of what makes a submissive woman most satisfactory to be with. You don’t want her to be perfect, and you don’t want her so afraid that she’s always watching out that she never annoys you. The balance you want is a girl who knows that you’re in charge, but isn’t afraid of you.

She should be afraid of doing things that you have warned her will bring her a severe punishment, but she should know that that comes from your care for her: and she should be afraid only of the specified severe punishment, and not afraid of you. She should be clearly told in advance what things will lead to severe punishment. That means she should always be able to avoid it, with just a bit of care.

So respecting you, loving you while accepting that she does as she’s told: those things require you to give her some discipline, but you also need to show her a lot of love.

Most of the time, a hand spanking over your knee will give her the guidance she needs. You keep spanking till you can hear that she’s not laughing any more, and it’s got through to her. But she’ll probably be playful and a bit cheeky again before the red has faded.

That’s okay. If she’s cheeky, then spank her some more – for the fun of it – and she’ll find a way of making that the start of an amusing and sexy evening.

4 The balance

So it’s right to set clear rules and consequences, and it’s right that in some cases punishment should be harsh enough to make her remember and fear getting that consequence again. But most of the time you and your new submissive are dancing together. In that dance you’re in control, overall, but she should be able to be herself too, to please and amuse you. And she should be having fun.

So don’t be too harsh. Don’t let her get away with things too much, either; a good hard hand spanking over your knee will never do her any harm.

Above all, you don’t want to tame her too far, let alone break her will. Her little rebellions are part of your dance, and you’ll come to enjoy having to put down the occasional insurrection. With a smile on your lips and a song in your heart.

Finally, I hear that you’ve bought your first riding crop. Good, and I hope it sees a lot of use. But that little that tassel on the end of the crop? Most of the time, that’s the part of the crop you use. You can apply it to her most intimate places. You only use the shaft of the crop when you want to teach one of those harsh lessons I mentioned.

Be careful, be loving, and always keep your sense of humour. Good luck!

Who the hell am I to say this?

I wrote that advice, above, because Lican has met a man. He’s not experienced in bdsm, but she thinks he’s a natural dom. But she’s worried because he reads things on the net, and he sometimes thinks he’s going to get absolute obedience from her and he’s going to base his disciplinary regime on stories he reads that are based on internet play and not reallity.

She told him about me, and he asked me to write something for him. I’ve posted it here because I hope it might be useful to someone else, and because I’d be keen to hear comments.

The thing is, I’m not feeling like the man who knows everything at the moment. I know some things, but my heart is currently ripped to shit because the woman I love left me, and that’s still the most important fact in my life. (Bless Lican, but I don’t mean Lican.) No-one feels clever alone, with their heart ripped open. Still, the things I’ve written here are things I do know, for what that’s worth.

Bondage in the Ice Age: BSDM 20,000 BCE!

Posted on March 31, 2014 by jaime

About twenty-two thousand years ago a tribe of humans crunched across white grass in a frozen landscape that’s now called Russia. Somewhere near the Don river valley they left behind two little sculptures. That’s how we know that these people, whoever they were, passed that way. It’s also how we know something surprising about their sexual imagination.

Kostenski Venus figurine, with her wrists bound: 20,000 BCE

These two sculptures, each one about the size of your hand, are of women. Like other Paleolithic “Venus figures”, the women are naked, or nearly naked, with exaggerated sexual features: their breasts hang hugely, like great sacks of grain, and their bellies swell, pregnant and vastly fat, like a ship’s sails.

What’s unusual about them is that one of the two women is shown with her wrists cuffed and tied, while the other woman is shown wearing a sort of harness that both restricts her movements and emphasises her breasts. That’s all they are depicted as wearing, although these images were created in the middle of an Ice Age. These two little sculptures seem to be the oldest known bondage erotica.

That tribe moved on, their destination and fate unknown. Since their day humans have done and built a lot of things, but some things don’t change. For one thing, it can’t be said that Russia’s improved much.

For another, it’s still true that whenever a new medium appears, from carving rocks to 3D imaging, one of the first things people will do is use it to make sexual images and tell sexual stories. And shortly after the first nudes are produced, someone else will come along and use the new medium for more specific sexual desires.

So the cultural history of what people now mostly call “bdsm” began about 21,000 years ago.

Constanze Mozart: Mozart wrote to her, promising her a "thorough spanking on her dear little, kissable arse", when he got home. Di he deliver? The look in her eye says yes.

Constanze Mozart: Mozart wrote to her, promising her a “thorough spanking on your dear little, kissable arse”, when he got home. Did he deliver? The look in her eye says yes.

People who are interested in bdsm have built up a quite impressive pile of art-works and artefacts. There are bdsm references in Mozart’s operas, Christopher Marlowe’s plays, and Mapplethorpe’s photos, just to skim the Ms for a second.

As a Mortimer, I’m quite proud of my sculpture, “Caning Bench No 1, with Comfort Saddle and Hooks for attaching Cuffs”. If some archeologist finds it 21,000 years from now, I hope he or she puts it to good use.

But it’s odd that we – we people who do bdsm – have failed to celebrate our novelists, and our poets and painters and composers, and so on.

I’ll be doing to some of that celebration over the coming months.

trust

Posted on November 21, 2013 by jaime

I’m not afraid of submissives. That may seem comically obvious, if you think submissive men or women are intrinsically harmless, simply because they’re submissive. But a submissive woman can hurt me a lot if I care for her and she doesn’t want what I can give her. A submissive woman I love can break my heart. Literally. (I mean literally.)

But I can hurt a submissive who puts herself under my domination. I can give her physical pain. I can give her psychological pain, too. I can make her sorry, or frightened, or – for a time – alone and helpless.

That’s why submissives come to me (when they do), or to some other dom. That’s what they want.

Submissives should be afraid of me, or of any dom. We can hurt them, and that’s something to be feared. But they don’t feel that fear, or they move past it. That ability to trust, to place oneself in someone else’s hands, is awe-inspiring. It is extraordinary. I admire it. There is immense courage there.

A dom will never be called to front up such courage,

The cheerfulness of punished submissives

Posted on November 20, 2013 by jaime

If someone bruised me deliberately, I’d expect that I’d have bruised them too. Since I don’t enjoy fighting, let alone getting hurt, I’d be angry both about getting hit and being put to the necessity of punching someone. I’ve had only about four physical fights in my life, and I’m just as annoyed at being pushed into the ones I “won” as the ones I lost.

There are movies in which two guys have a fist fight and then become best friends, but that could never be me. I just get pissed off that I’ve been pushed into something scary and painful, where the best outcome, “winning”, is sour. Hit me and you make an enemy.

But when a submissive woman takes a spanking or a flogging from me, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered hard feelings. Sorrow, maybe, if I’ve given a punishment, but the most common feeling I’ve had fed back to me when I let her up, and in the morning after, is pleasure, either calm and satisfied, or giddy and cheerful like Sa’afia.

Um… I think I was going to say something more complicated than this. Anyway, it’s amazingly fortunate that there are both dominants and submissives, since we need each other.

Probation Officer #95E: Assertiveness and submission

Posted on October 11, 2013 by jaime

Neither Sa’afia nor I could have wanted to punch the other, even as mock-violence, even as an affectionate “joke”.

In sex, Sa’afia wanted to give her surrender and to have her surrender taken. She wanted to be given orders and to feel herself obeying them. She wanted me to find reasons to punish her, so that she could feel that she had no choice when she obeyed and served me. It wasn’t enough to surrender: she wanted to feel it. She wanted her surrender to be palpable, something she could wrap around herself like a cloak.

Dominance and submission is about tightly focussed attention.

I wasn’t very experienced in bdsm. I had a lot to learn. But at least I knew ways to let her feel her surrender, and intensify her experience. While we were exploring those feelings together she didn’t want to be anything as trivial as “feisty”. She was strong and courageous. Even waiting for me, naked in her kitchen simply because I’d told her to over the phone, was extremely brave.

She could have ignored that instruction and our evening would still have been good. We’d still have found our way to bed, and I probably would have smacked her bottom lightly. I’d have done it after her first orgasm, when we were building to her second, and I thought it’d be a safe experiment: she’d like pretty much anything I did.

So we’d still have explored some very light surrender, but it would have been a much safer and flatter night.

She chose the riskier option, a definite, explicit act of obedience. It could have gone wrong. She must have worried that I might laugh at her, or that I’d take her surrender and do something stupid and cruel that genuinely hurt. She put her dignity and her safety on the line for what she wanted. That pushed us past various polite pretences and it pushed me up to match her courage. I had to take back the lead, take her surrender, and make her feel it.

What a submissive does when they kneel to serve their dominant, or they present themselves to be fucked or hurt, may not look like any traditional picture of courage. But it’s honest, assertive and brave.

At other times, Sa’afia and I would be shopping together, and she might laugh at the clothes I wanted to buy, or my taste in music. Then she might be playful, and do “feisty” like a fucking Disney fucking princess, as she’d have said. But in sex she preferred something stronger than feist.

Probation Officer #95D: Standing while kneeling

Posted on October 10, 2013 by jaime

Sa’afia wasn’t just a dolly who’d do whatever she’s told. She was a submissive woman. She did things that she liked, that turned her on.

She stood up for herself, even when she knelt. Or bent over to be spanked or fucked, knowing that she wouldn’t choose which happened. But that was something she wanted. I provided it for her.