The Breaking Point

Oops! Poor little paddle! And poor me! This is only the beginning.

We didn't call our new film The Breaking Point just because Mr. Williams broke the new paddle on my backside, although it did have something to do with it.

Nor did we call it that because I took my punishment staunchly until something inside me twisted and broke open. No, I actually took to sobbing fairly early on. We'd both had a terrible few days and we needed this scene, but it nearly didn't happen because I was feeling obstinate and unsexy. When he bends me over the bench at the very beginning of the film, it's not so much the beginning of our movie as it is the end of Mr. W putting up with me. Guilt flooded me as I simultaneously began to release the stress of the day into the pain. Everything--my mind, my heart, my soul, my backside--hurt, and the tears flowed freely the moment the first one escaped down my cheek.

The real breaking point, the point when everything changes, occurs after the last stroke of what was to be punishment. I was to take eighteen strokes of the cane. After the first six, I begin to feel nauseous, dizzy, not certain I can take any more. At twelve, I feel thoroughly punished and ready to be held. For a moment, I even think I'm going to receive a reprieve and that I am finished. I'm wrong. I receive the next three strokes with squeals of agony, but then, with stroke sixteen, I am silent. I realize my silence with stroke seventeen, and ride the pain with number eighteen. The scene is edited to show my face during these strokes, and the transition from punished girl to woman craving discipline is palpable. After the eighteenth stroke, I ask, "Can I have more please?"

The answer, of course, is yes.

I think the perceived "breaking point" is often when a girl begins to cry, or moves from tears to sobbing. Even the phrase sounds like a shattering, not a union of body with pain. But I'm very vocal about my pain, and have been known to become a weeping wreck at sad sitcom episodes, nevermind physical duress. I'm not saying there have not been times when I've crumbled during a punishment--I have, and in those instances, the crumbling was my breaking point. This time, though, the stressed, panicked, crying girl was the broken one, and I somehow was the one to break through. I've rewatched those few strokes quite a few times now, and I can literally see me become myself. And then I become embarassed, because the strokes that come after the punishment was supposed to be over are fast and hard and hot, and I feel strange at being turned on by myself, and I feel strange that this intimate moment I've written about countless times has been caught on film. It's not just viable, it's now visible to others.

"Why do I like this?" That's a question I no longer ask myself. Now, during a punishment, I ask myself, "Do I like this?" Last night, for the first eighteen minutes of my discipline, the answer was no. The breaking point--when the answer became yes. Yes. Yes.

Mr. Williams, seemingly wondering if it hurts.

Yes. Yes it does.