The Monster at the End of This Post

Yahoo's homepage today features this photo of students in uniform with the question, "Are school uniforms harmful or helpful?" The link leads to Yahoo Answers, one of the most terrifying sources of information on the Internet. If you need a question answered by a twelve year old with an attitude and poor spelling, this is the place to go. Needless to say, most of the responses were against uniforms. A few adults chimed in to point out that school is a place to learn, but nobody seemed terribly impressed.

Now, if I was one of the tween or teen students responding, I, too, would have been against being made to wear a uniform, though being a spelling bee champion, I could have made my case more convincingly. In fact, I was part of an anti-dresscode rebellion during my first year of highschool. A male friend was sent home for wearing a skirt. It was the early nineties, after all. We made posters and passed out petitions, telling students that if the boys couldn't wear skirts, soon the girls wouldn't be allowed to wear pants. We won, to a degree. Boys won the rights to wear kilts. Good enough.

This is all so humorous in retrospect, considering I spent a good portion of my weekend putting together a schoolgirl outfit that I could get away with wearing in public. Friday night found the perfect plaid skirt, knee-length, with a slight A-line. I'd have to be ten years younger or thirty years older to have gotten away with pleats. A simple black sweater vest was next. Throw it on over any button-down shirt--instant schoolgirl/librarian (perfect, as I worked in a library in highschool, and still miss it terribly). Oddly enough, the white blouse was more difficult to find. I gave up on the long-sleeved version, especially as I already have a few, and found a very fitted one with adorable puffed sleeves. It could double as a milkmaid blouse, which is fine. Milkmaids need spankings too. New black Mary Janes on Saturday completed the ensemble. Naturally, I already had the white knee socks at home.

This is where Yahoo's question becomes problematic. Whether a school uniform is harmful or helpful really depends on the goal, doesn't it? If my goal was to get a 24-stroke caning with no warm-up, then I'd say the uniform was quite helpful, indeed. However, from a hands-on-my-ankles, tear-drops-on-the-floor perspective, I'd say the outfit was fairly harmful to my poor plump bottom. So it's a toss-up. I had a wonderfully terrible, or terribly wonderful, time of it. So, to sum up: Plaid skirt on sale at Macy's, seventy dollars on debit Mastercard. White schoolgirl-milkmaid blouse, thirty dollars on debit Mastercard. Mary Janes at a terrific price, seventeen dollars on debit Mastercard. A perfectly striped caning from the man who loves me? Priceless.

Halfway through the caning, I was put in the corner while my husband went to find my camera. We've never taken photos of me during or after a punishment before, mostly due to my own self-consciousness. He left such perfect marks, though, that he couldn't resist, and I wasn't exactly about to say no. Halfway through a caning could easily have turned into a third or a fourth of the way through. After we admired the pictures, he encouraged me to post them here. I never planned to share my bountiful bottom on this page, but I do want to show of his handywork.

See how much I love my marks, Sir? Let's hope they like 'em too.

P.S. For those not current on their Sesame Street literature, "The Monster at the End of this Book" was a classic Grover tome, in which the monster at the end of the book turns out to be Grover himself.