Thank you for your payment! 

You have made a starving writer very happy!

To return to this bloggy excellence, click here.

If you wish to cancel a payment, send me a note here: 

If your payment has gone through I’ll cancel any future on-going payments and send a refund of any money received after (or three days before) you sent your cancellation request!

Thank you!

Note: This is a continuing story, and its previous episode is here.

I’d told Stephanie she was coming to my room still naked, but on her hands and knees. She looked at me. If she did as I said it’d be humiliating. On the other hand, it’d be hot. Worse, or better, it’d be hot because it was humiliating. 

She chose a form of resistance that was calculated to be futile. “‘Walk to heel’? I’m not your dog.”

Eventually I said, “No. You’re my girl. Tonight, anyway. And you’re going to do as you’re told.”

“Am I?”

“Yes, Stephanie. Because you want to. Because you and I both really want you to. And…  because if you don’t I’ll take my belt to this gorgeous arse.”

“Oh!” She looked shocked for a second, then amused by me.

“And you’d say that’s not a threat it’s a promise?”

“Neither. It’s just information.”

I stepped back, because I needed space to move one hand from her bottom, to stroke her cunt.

Stephanie, sweetly, wetly stroked, moved her feet apart a little, and put her arms round me while I pleasured her.

I was holding almost all of her weight now.

But it was important to have her wanting more. I took my fingers from her cunt, and held them to her mouth for her to lick and suck clean.

“Good girl, Stephanie,” I said. “Now: hands and knees. Drop.”

And Stephanie looked at my eyes. Sh swallowed. She’d committed herself. She lowered herself to her knees, kissing the bulge in my jeans her way down, and assumed her new position.

On all fours. On the concrete doorstep.

I opened the door. 

Note: The next episode is here.

Watch and chain

A protocol is, essentially, a standing order that a dom gives to his or her sub. The sub must always carry out those protocols, even if not reminded or instructed in the moment.

An example of a protocol (not one I’d impose, because I like eye contact too much) is: “The submissive will not make eye contact with the dominant, but will look straight ahead or down when they are speaking.”

The thing about protocols is that they increase awareness for both the dom and the sub, but especially the sub, of their relationship. They extend the emotional and sexual pleasures that come from simply being dom and sub, together. 

“Caution: bdsm time will end in 18 minutes”

In practice a dom/sub couple only do very active dominant and submissive things – flogging and tying and commanding and obeying – for a small proportion of their time together.

They also have to rest, and eat, and choose entertainments, and go to work, and worry about their parents or their children and so on. Life goes on, and a lot of it is mundane. 

So, if you look at it in one way, their experience of time is that there are short intense bdsm experiences followed by long stretches of vanilla time. 

Eternity, mother of many acts and hours

Protocols act to extend bdsm consciousness into more of that dom’s and sub’s consciousness and experience of time. They give a kind of immersion experience.

Bdsm, dominance and submission, isn’t a place you occasionally go, it’s where you live. Protocols help to keep the roles alive and active even when the couple is doing mundane things. 

So, the dom may be doing the dishes, but the sub will still address him or her by their title: Sir, Ma’am, Master or Mistress. 

The submissive may have to ask for permission to enter or leave the room, if the dom is in that room. Something like that takes only a couple of seconds, and yet it suddenly makes real and palpable the reality of their relationship, and what they’ve given each other, even in an otherwise unsexy moment. It’s a miniature flash of lightning, a reminder of the connection and the tension between dom and sub.

I’ve listed some protocols I’m thinking of imposing on someone who’s new to bdsm, and is in a fairly light regime, below.

Introductory protocols

The submissive will address the dom as “sir”. 

The submissive will wear the collar given him or her by the dom, plus any other given adornment.

The submissive will wear what the dom instructs. 

The submissive will kiss the dom in greeting if they’ve been apart for longer than, oh, five minutes.

The submissive will ask permission to enter or leave the room the dominant is in. 

The submissive will respectfully remind the dom of any matters needed to ensure the sub’s continued good health and well-being.

The submission will address the dom respectfully, no matter how egregiously he or she may have just fucked up.

Those are my suggestions, as starting points. Any thoughts or suggestions?

I wrote about my first threesome here. 

It was one of the highlights of my life, and ever since I’ve been drawn to threesomes. But they can cost you. I know several relationships that broke up shortly after the threesome. 

When I told the story, I mentioned two clues I’d missed at the time, about what was going to happen next. The first was that Amanda had somehow developed impressive cunnilingus skills, and enthusiasm, though she was in a relationship with me, and we were supposed to be being faithful.

I’d held up my end of the deal. That doesn’t make me morally superior, by the way. It was just how it was. It’s maybe also a reason why I’ve since been less interested in sexual exclusivity. Though I’ll do that when it’s important to the girl I’m with and she’s important to me. 

The other clue I should have spotted was when Amanda kissed Miranda. I kissed Miranda like I was fond of her, and pleased she was there. Amanda kissed her as though she desperately in love with her. Which she was. 

So I organised the next night for the three of us. I’m not going to write about it, or not now, but it was every bit as hot as the first night. Hotter.

But the next time, after that second threesome, that I took Miranda to bed she was on her own, and she’d sneaked over to my place while Amanda was at a meeting.

She mentioned that she and Amanda had been fucking a lot, at Miranda’s place. She thought I knew. That hurt, not because they’d been fucking but because Amanda had been secretive. 

Anyway, we struggled along for another couple of weeks, and then Amanda moved out, into an all-women, no boys allowed, house. And Miranda slept with her most nights. 

Miranda, I think, would have preferred to be in the threesome, because she fancied both of us, and she wanted something warm and open-ended more than she wanted an obsessional love. But obsessional love has its power. I was her relief from Amanda’s intensity. Also, I had a cock, and no demands on exclusivity with her. She liked both of those things. 

But Amanda didn’t like Miranda fucking anyone but her. At the end of the year, she went to a feminist event in London. And paid for Miranda to come. I never saw Miranda again. That wasn’t so sad, I liked Miranda a lot, and I loved having sex with her, but I wasn’t in love with her. What was sad was that I only saw Amanda one more time, two years later.

I’d been in love with her, my first love, and my heart was broken. I still loved her when I saw her two years later. I passed over the things she’d left behind when she’d moved out, and stored with me when she went to London. 

And that was that. No-one was to blame. Amanda was in new love, and that made her ruthless. But that’s a human need.

Amanda had, I’m pretty sure, loved me until she switched to Miranda. I’d been the best boyfriend-of-a-feminist I knew how to be. And Miranda was just a sexy woman exploring and having fun. 

So I was left alone, with just some memories. Well, “left alone” doesn’t last long, for a guy who’d been a virtuous boyfriend, mildly and locally famous, and unattainable for the four years I was with Amanda. I learnt a lot about female sexual enthusiasm afterwards. But I stayed in love with Amanda for years. 

There’s no moral. Just, nothing is safe. Enter it with your eyes open. 

It’s been surprisingly hard to get rid of “corporal punishment” in schools.

That’s the last time I’m going to use the “corporal punishment” in this series of posts. It’s better to acknowledge openly that we’re talking about the beating of children with lengths of wood or strips of leather,

It’s mostly directed that the child’s hands or buttocks, usually by adults though sometimes other children are delegated to beat other students. Let’s call it “beating of school children”.

Beating children in schools should really have gone out in the 19th century, along with shoving children up chimneys or working them in mines (future posts will go into why that’s so). But the United Kingdom only abolished school beatings in the 1980s, nearly a century later.

Former British colonies and dominions like Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and most of the African Anglosphere also abolished it at about that time. But children and young people are still being beaten at school, quite legally, in quite a lot of Asia, in Islamic countries and, weirdly, in the United States.

Those red-coloured States are the ones where child beating in schools is still legal.

There’s an interesting correlation between between blue, or Democrat States and red, Republican States. as the map indicates.

The major opponent of abolition has been the political and religious right, particularly the religious right, who fought to keep child beating in every one of those jurisdictions.

In some jurisdictions, like Australia, there was a compromise that banned beatings in publicly owned schools but not in privately owned schools.

So if, as a loving parent, you felt your daughter should have the experience of having her arse beaten by someone you don’t know, unsupervised, possibly a male teacher, then you’d send that child to a school run by someone like the Christian Accelerated Education people. The Catholic schools would make sure the stranger who beat your child would be the same gender, as if that helped.

There’s one oddity about this, because many in the Christian right are fundamentalists, believing in Biblical inerrancy. And yet research on this group has found that most have never actually read the Bible.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child”: what’s that about?

Anyway, there’s that line, “spare the rod and spoil the child”. It gets quoted by people who think it’s God’s word endorsing beating children, and that it was probably something that Solomon said. (By the way, I’m not denying that the Bible says many creepy things about violence against children, including endorsing their sexual enslavement. I’m not arguing that the Bible isn’t nasty.) 

The real story of where that line came from is quite different, and it’s illuminating on why defence of child beating is so often so very passionate.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child” is from a satirical poem by Samuel Butler (a 17th century poet, not the Victorian novelist), called Hudibras. It’s long but very funny.

In the Second Book, the hero’s in jail, since he tried to break up a bear-baiting match. He’s got a nice widow coming to visit him in jail. She’s taken with him, since he’s got money, fame and a certain amount of charm. But he’s disconcerted: he can’t get an erection. 

So the widow gives him some advice. What he needs to get his sexual powers back, she says, is a good whipping. “Why not whipping?” she asks. “What medicine else can cure the fits/ Of lovers when they lose their wits?”

She explains that the god of sexual love, the boy-god Eros, is zestier if there’s a flogging in the air.

“Love’s a boy, by poets styled,/ So spare the rod and spoil the child.”

A good erotic whipping will not only fix his condition; it’ll also stimulate her. She points out that that whipping, done with grace and art, will “raise passion in a woman’s heart.”

Hudibras

Those of us who think that there’s a fair level of unacknowledged sexual interest involved in a lot of the advocacy of child beatings may also think it’s kind of amusing that this favoured phrase isn’t a divine command but a sexually impatient woman’s endorsement of sexual whipping. 

(Future posts in this series will be a tad less literary. But we’ve got to start somewhere.)