Tag: Corporal

Community Policing

I normally like to add some color commentary when linking to articles. For this post I’m not really sure I can. This Huffington Post article and this Vancouver Sun article are quite different stories but ostensibly the same issue. A member of the BDSM community is accused of abusive behavior, the community attempts some degree of self-policing, the law gets involved, and things do not go well. While the legal issues are very different, the message is the same. It discourages people from coming forward and makes challenging abuse harder.

I’m not really involved in my local BDSM community, and have no wise words to offer here. I would love to know if there are positive cases out there where people have had success in tackling allegations of abuse in the kinky scene. It would seem we’re sorely in need of good examples to highlight and point people toward.

This drawing is by Stig, an artist who specializes in judicial and corporal scenes.

Strange Reaction

I’ve experienced a strange emotional response in recent weeks. People hitting me has made me angry. That’s obviously not unusual for most people but for me, in the context of kink, it’s very strange. Corporal play was one of my primary fantasies for many years and a staple of my scenes. Yet recently it has generated less of an “Ooohhh, yeah….” and more of a “Hey! That hurts goddamn it!”

I have no idea why this is. Other painful things like needles, electricity, clamps and miscellaneous spiky things still get me buzzed and into that submissive floaty space. I can lean into their pain and relax under the dominants control. Yet corporal play had triggered the bad kind of ‘fight or flight’ response where I just want to make it stop.

I’m really hoping it’s a temporary thing. Maybe it’s to do with external stress or me being general angry at the state of the world. I’m not conscious of that kind of mental shift, but clearly something is awry. I’ve never met a domme yet who didn’t enjoy some form of corporal play, and I’d hate to lose such an important part of my kinky repertoire. Anyone else find they’ve had a favorite activity suddenly twist on them like this?

While my physical response might be screwed up, my visual response to corporal is still working just fine. I love this action shot from the Glasgow based Mistress Scarlet (found on her twitter feed).

Jennifer Brooks

A final image in this vintage themed series of posts. Miss Brooks below is Jennifer Brooks who started out as a spanking model and gradually shifted into playing primarily dominant roles over time. I knew her from her work in the Leda videos from Ed Lee. I hadn’t realized until I start researching this post that she actually went on to start her own company for spanking films called Brooks Applications and also published the Femdom magazine Behind the Scene. You can see an example cover from Issue 4 (1993) of that here. 

I’m pretty certain I’ve browsed examples of her latter work, without actually realizing it wasn’t associated with Leda. My bad. She shut down her company just over 10 years ago in 2009. Whatever you’re doing now Miss Brooks, thanks for all the great magazines and videos you created over the years.

I feel I can’t complete this post without a callout to the text alongside the cane image above. It’s not often that kinky porn will include a phrase like “Guaranteed to break the will of the most wretched curmudgeon…” Kudos to whoever wrote that caption. As a man who sees curmudgeon in his future, I’d agree the cane is an excellent implement to break that particular affliction. 

A New Kind of Resolution

This is the time of year for making resolutions. Normally this means I pick some, fail to keep them, feel bad about that and finally forget them entirely. This year I’m going to try a new approach – giving everyone else in the world a resolution. Obviously this is unlikely to be entirely 100% successful, but the same is true for my usual resolutions and at least when this fails, it’ll be other peoples fault rather than mine. Genius.

The resolution I’m assigning is this: Resist the urge to share, re-tweet or forward stupid or ugly things on social media. Thinking that something is dumb and then simply moving on is a perfectly valid action. There’s no need to spread that shit around.

In theory this resolution should be an easy one, as it involves *not* doing something. It’ll actually save you time! Unfortunately, social media companies are very good at hacking our emotions and appealing to people’s innate sense of fairness. We want to punish wrongdoers and unite our tribe against them. Re-tweeting a slam on someone seems to achieve this. In reality it just triggers social media chain reactions, drives user clicks and makes the social media companies money.

I should qualify at this point that I’m not talking about situations where influential people or companies do or say something terrible. In that case social media actually helps balance the scales somewhat. Lots of quieter voices can unite to match a much louder one. I’m taking about the cases where some misogynistic / homophobic / anti-sexwork garbage shows up on my social feed from some random idiot with just a handful of followers. Inevitably in those cases it’s because someone I follow has shared it with comments explaining just how terrible and wrong it is. So an opinion which would normally have died quietly and alone in a dusty corner of the internet is now being broadcast to tens of thousands of people and generating all sorts of craziness.

If you’re re-tweeting a troll then you’re making them happy. If you’re arguing with an idiot then you’re wasting your time. If it’s just some random person who did a stupid thing, then leave them to their stupid thing and move on. There’s no need for to pile on and humiliate them over it. Jon Ronson has excellent book on the effects of social media on that last category of people, which I think is well worth reading.

I think we all like to imagine our social media selves as the lady below. Rather than a simple paddle we’ll deploy our cutting wit and re-tweet button to change the mind of the ignorant and punish the evil. In reality we’re more like someone who treads in dog shit on the way to a party and decides that rather than quietly scraping it off we should show all our friends just how nasty it is.

The caption is of course from Servitor over at Contemplating the Divine. Sadly, the School Mistress site that created the original image appears to have ceased to exist.

Flogging Fun

It’s a shame flogging doesn’t get more love when it comes to corporal play. Whips have more drama. Canes more visual appeal. Spanking pushes more psychological buttons. Yet in terms of factors like the intensity of sensation delivered, control over the escalation of intensity, the overall skill required and the margins for error, flogging is arguably the best bang for buck in corporal play.

I’d also say that out of all the corporal toys,floggers have the greatest variety in the type of sensations it can create. They can be light or heavy, thuddy or stingy, blunt or sharp. Some can feel like a great massage and others like you were lashed with razors. Whatever the masochistic mood, there’s probably a flogger that’ll suit it.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image.

A Triumph of Hope Over Experience

I’m a big fan of pulp novel covers from the 60’s and 70’s. They’re the perfect example of selling the sizzle rather than the steak. The book contents might consistently disappoint, but there was always the hope that the next one might live up to the erotic delights promised by its cover. An endless sequence of the triumph of hope over experience.

This example, courtesy of this tweet by the Pulp Librarian, features a severe looking nurse, a glimpse of stocking and a cane. Admittedly, a cane makes absolutely no sense for a nurse to be brandishing, but pulp illustrators never let a silly thing like logic get in the way of a sexy cover. As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia page on the novel itself, there’s also nothing in the book about nurses, corporal punishment or kink. Anyone buying this book based on the cover probably knew that was the case, but still let their little brain override the big one.

Learning Curve

This drawing by Arrakis made me smile, but I have to quibble about the reaction of the submissive. I don’t think anyone at the end of a beginner’s beating is going to be bored and strumming their fingers. You never know quite what you’re going to be on the receiving end of. Particularly if there is an implement involved. Only the most leather skinned submissive will be blase about that situation.

The English Vice

Speaking of kinky cause and effect – as I just was – corporal punishment and impact play is another interesting example of an arguably misattributed cause. It used to be said that the English love of spanking and flagellation was derived from the use of corporal punishment in school. As a theory, it seems to make sense. Boys just coming into adolescence and packed with sexual energy were being beaten, and then transmuting that trauma into a kink. Hence, we ended up with the English Vice.

The flaw in this claim is that corporal punishment has been banned from British schools for a long time now, yet it still seems to be as popular as ever in kink. It’s also popular across a wide range of countries, even those that didn’t think beating children was a good idea. Personally, I was never beaten as a child, but corporal punishment scenes featured heavily in my fantasies in my 20’s and 30’s.

Obviously to prove the case one way or another one would need to do a proper survey and analyze kinky preferences over time and culture. It’s possible that corporal scenes are a lot more popular with a certain type of older British male than in the rest of the kinky community. But my suspicion would be that while corporal punishment in school might have colored peoples kinks, anyone who ended up indulging in it later in life would have been kinky anyway. Those submissives who were spanked or caned as children draw a correlation, where those who weren’t simply shrug and don’t worry about why they like it.

I’m afraid I’ve no idea who shot this picture of this happy lady caner.

Poetry in Motion

There’s always something quite satisfying about these moment of impact pictures. It’s like the super slow-mo shots of glass shattering or a water balloon popping. That sense of a chaotic high energy transformation being momentarily captured and contained. Of course, I doubt the person on the receiving end thought about it that way. They were probably more concerned about where exactly the energy was being transferred to.

This is a shot I found from in an old tumblr archive. I’ve no idea where it was originally from.

Role Models?

One slightly random follow-up thought from yesterday’s teacher related post: Why is it that parents thinks teachers need to be a role model for their pupils? Anytime there’s a minor scandal in a teacher’s private life, that’s the line that gets trotted out. I don’t get it. What pupils think their teachers are so amazing that they want to copy them? Frankly if there’s anything likely to make nude selfies seem uncool, it’s finding out your teacher is doing them.

I had many teachers, some good and some bad. I never saw any of them as a role model. My main thought was – why would any adult want to come back to school and deal with all these asshole teenagers? I can’t wait to get away from all this.

Of course I do have fond memories of some teachers. My English teacher – a Miss West – springs to mind. She had the right mix of intelligence, stern authority and care for her pupils that made an adolescent paltego quite smitten. A fact he demonstrated by walking into things, dropping books and tripping over his own feet anytime they crossed paths.

Sadly I think the site this image is originally from has ceased to be.