I’ve just finished reading Sarah Water’s new novel The Little Stranger. Set in post-war Warwickshire, it’s about the Ayres, an eccentric, old-money family living in decline in a haunted manor house. Like all her writing, it’s engaging, atmospheric and spooky, although I remain disappointed that she seems to have moved away from the (slightly trashy, [...]
Posts Tagged ‘books’
"I’m Fiona Locke, and so’s my wife!"
Posted by Pandora on July 13th, 2009
The reason I’ve never written a review of Fiona Locke‘s “definitive CP novel” Over the Knee is an interesting story. When I was at uni, we had a “family” system for first years, where an older student doing the same subject would be picked to be your mentor. My uni “mum” and I couldn’t really [...]
Posted in Uncategorized 
Tags: books, Fiona Locke, making a scene, spanking blogs, those crazy kinksters 
26 Comments »a ghost from the past
Posted by Pandora on March 22nd, 2009
I’ve spent the weekend back home for Mothering Sunday, which was entirely excellent. I gave my mum a couple of spring seedlings and we stayed up until 3am drinking single malt and setting the world to rights. ‘Home’ involved familiar countryside, family friends I haven’t seen for fifteen years, and my parents’ tiny but beautiful [...]
Affinity
Posted by Pandora on December 29th, 2008
Merry Christmas! I hope everyone’s having a brilliant holiday. Today was my first day “back at work”, but I’m afraid I haven’t achieved very much. Having spent the last four days drinking, carousing and staying up all night with my family of choice, I’m still recovering. I got up this morning, blearily checked my email, [...]
Posted in Fantasies, Victoriana Tags: books, corrupting the innocent, meta-analysis, reviews 4 Comments »With the flat of a sword
Posted by Pandora on June 8th, 2008
I had a delightful dream last night, full of pirates and conspiracy and being on the run out of Manhattan in a huge inflatable dinghy with spies and freedom fighters. At one point, one of the pirates broke an article of the pirate code and was duly punished by the pirate captain: eight hard strokes, applied on the bare with the flat of the captain’s sword. The welts that blossomed under the tempered steel were very distinctive; raised white and purple weals fading to red at the edges.
Now, despite both my doms being experienced fencers, I’ve never been beaten with the flat of a sword. Neither of them has fenced for years, and these days their hectic work schedules mean we don’t get the chance to play as often as we’d like – and when we do, we tend to stick to what we know works. So I have no way of knowing whether or not the dramatic welts my subconscious produced were realistic or not.
I’ve googled, but to no avail: the internet doesn’t seem to have any photos of people being spanked with swords; the closest I could find was a reference to the Bride’s fight with Crazy 88 in Kill Bill, where she sends the last man standing on his way with a humiliating smack to the arse with her sword – but over clothes, disappointingly. I also found a couple of fantasy porn stories which mentioned sword spankings, but in my opinion nothing can rival the formative scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which affected me deeply when I first read it aged 7, and which has stayed with me ever since.
It’s early on in the book, before Eustace’s transformative experience on Dragon Island, when he’s going out of his way to make himself objectionable to everyone on board. He particularly dislikes Reepicheep, the chivalrous talking Mouse, and one day Eustace sneaks up behind Reepicheep on the deck and swings him round by the tail. Reep stabs him in the hand, and then faces Eustance, brandishing his rapier and challenging him to a duel:
“Why do you not draw your own sword, poltroon!” cheeped the Mouse. “Draw and fight or I’ll beat you black and blue with the flat.”“I haven’t got one,” said Eustace. “I’m a pacifist. I don’t believe in fighting.”
“Do I understand,” said Reepicheep, withdrawing his sword for a moment and speaking very sternly, “that you do not intend to give me satisfaction?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Eustace, nursing his hand. “If you don’t know how to take a joke I shan’t bother my head about you.”
“Then take that,” said Reepicheep, “and that – to teach you manners – and the respect due to a knight – and a Mouse – and a Mouse’s tail -” and at each word he gave Eustace a blow with the side of his rapier, which was thin, fine dwarf-tempered steel and as supple and effective as a birch rod. Eustace (of course) was at a school where they didn’t have corporal punishment, so the sensation was quite new to him. That was why, in spite of having no sea-legs, it took him less than a minute to get off that forecastle and cover the whole length of the deck and burst in at the cabin door – still hotly pursued by Reepicheep. Indeed it seemed to Eustace that the rapier as well as the pursuit was hot. It might have been red-hot by the feel.
There was not much difficulty in settling the matter once Eustace realised that everyone took the idea of a duel quite seriously and heard Caspian offering to lend him a sword, and Drinian and Edmund discussing whether he ought to be handicapped in some way to make up for his being so much bigger than Reepicheep. He apologized sulkily and went off with Lucy to have his hand bathed and bandaged and then went to his bunk. He was very careful to lie on his side.
- C. S. Lewis, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”
Eustace doesn’t earn himself a beating again, although before he reforms he comes close one more time, when Reepicheep catches him trying to steal water from the ship’s rations. The incident is reported in Eustace’s diary:
“I had to apologize or the dangerous little brute would have been at me with his sword. And then Caspian showed up in his true colours as a brutal tyrant and said out loud for everyone to hear that anyone found “stealing” water in future would “get two dozen”. I didn’t know what this meant till Edmund explained it to me. It comes in the sort of books those Pevensie kids read.”
Which I always thought was a nice little meta-textual reference: of course any child reading the Narnia books would know what it means, too.
However, even wonderful excerpts like this don’t help with the question of what the marks look like. I imagine it depends on the sword – rapier welts would look very different from those left by a flatter blade. I’ll try and persuade one of my boyfriends to introduce me to the sensation (and hopefully take some photos for you while I’m at it. I might even dress up in a wench outfit), but if any of you can find pictorial evidence to assuage my curiousity in the meantime, I’ll be a very happy girl. And it’d hopefully give me some idea what to expect …
bottom-tuning
Posted by Pandora on May 22nd, 2008
Posting about wooden paddles got me thinking. So much of a person’s pain threshold has to do with familiarity. As I was discussing with Ludwig in a comment thread recently, familiarity with your play partner, and trust in them, is a huge factor. Familiarity with the scenario is another, although I guess that’s counterbalanced by the thrill associated with fear of the unknown. But for me, familiarity with an implement is hugely significant.
My favourite implement is the cane. I think it works both ways: I like the cane, so I’m more likely to be caned than anything else; and the more I’m caned the more I like it. Part of that is knowing I can take it, having the experience to trust myself to let go and accept what’s happening to me. Canings affect me deeply but they don’t freak me out. I’m very at home with the implement, and however horrible it is at the time, being aware intellectually that I’ve done this before and it’s okay does tend to help. (I haven’t, however, been caned to the standards of Lupus or Mood Pictures. I keep going back and forth on whether I’d want to. Part of me would want one of my Doms to do it if anyone was going to – another part of me would want the experience to be “worth something”, to be as part of a story as rich as the ones Lupus create. Maybe I’ll make my own severe caning film, someday.)
So my inability to take a real paddling has nothing to do with my basic pain threshold. I’ve been taken pretty deep in the past. It’s to do with the type of pain, my body’s reaction to it, and how used to it I am. Part of processing pain is shock. The shock of something unfamiliar is much more powerful than the shock of something familiar. Part of the terror of the paddle, for me, is not knowing what to expect.
To me, this would seem to tie into the fear of canes you often see in spankees who are used to the paddle. It’s a different sort of pain. It’s unfamiliar, it’s scary, and your bottom is less used to taking it and processing it and healing from it. As such, an unfamiliar implement used on an experienced bottom is often like being a newbie again. You have to go through the whole learning process again every time you encounter a new kind of sensation.
It occured to me that this process, of familiarising certain bottoms with certain implements (and simultaneously rendering them unexpectedly vulnerable to unfamiliar ones) could be thought of as “tuning”. And it’s not just canes and paddles, although the American/British school conventions have created an obvious binary. I know subs who can fly from a flogging but shy away from more traditional spanko implements. Anne Rice’s Beauty trilogy is full of severe beatings with leather straps and wooden paddles because those are what the author was most familiar with, but there’s nary a crop or cane in sight. And I know spankos whose comfort-zone is hand-spanking, plain and simple, and who dislike “harder” implements but can probably take a far harder hand-spanking than I could.
I’ve certainly been “tuned” to different implements at different points in my life. Which makes me wonder whether it’s a question of circumstance – that a bottom is tuned to whichever implements are most readily available when they first start playing, and then re-tuned to whatever is used on them most often – or preference? Do some people just like different sensations and experiment till they discover what they like best? Will I always be tuned to canes, or would be it be possible to re-tune me, teach me to take those severe paddlings I fantasise about? Or is the effect cumulative, and being tuned to an implement doesn’t expire when you’re tuned to another one?
I doubt I’ll ever be tuned to heavy wooden paddles: Mr C. believes that repeated use numbs the nerve endings of the bottom, and he wants to keep me as sensitive as possible. (Although Bailey‘s self-confessed vulnerability after years of heavy paddlings would suggest that isn’t always the case.) And besides, if I was tuned to them, they wouldn’t be horrifying any more. And where’s the fun in that?
Miss Montana’s academy
Posted by Pandora on April 30th, 2008
I don’t know if any of you have read Exit to Eden by Anne Rampling? (one of Anne Rice’s many pseuodonyms for her erotic fiction). It’s one of her better works, far superior to the silly and overblown Sleeping Beauty trilogy. Or perhaps I’m just biased – it was one of the very first works [...]
Posted in English Spankers, Performers & producers, Photos, Sites & studios, Videos, Zoe Montana Tags: books, shoot writeups 4 Comments »Erotic Memoirs: redux
Posted by Pandora on December 18th, 2006
You know how I said that the Erotic Memoirs of Paris in the 1920s didn’t have spanking in? Having now finished it, I have to confess that I was being rather presumptive, and entirely wrong. While it only has a little bit of spanking, it also has large sections of M/f and F/m BDSM and [...]
To resist and to yield
Posted by Pandora on December 7th, 2006
“For nothing is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist. Surely it throws the spirit into such a rapture as nothing else can.” – Orlando, Virginia Woolf Oh, Orlando – gender bending, military uniforms, Elizabethan dresses, and, apparently, a bit of dominance and submission. Yield is one of my [...]
Paris in the 1920s
Posted by Pandora on December 6th, 2006
I picked up this book a few weeks ago in one of those perfect little old-fashioned bookshops; full of dusty piles of treasures, everything from beautiful editions of English classics to old knitting magazines to photography books to modern paperbacks. It has an entire alley of fairytales and Victorian childrens’ literature at the back, where [...]
