Hello, Voyeur

I claimed the title of Exhibitionist/Voyeur for my own last week. After a lifetime of writing and talking about spanking and sex, after more than a decade of posting pics to show off my ass, whether a blank canvas or a masterpiece of markings and a glimpse of drippy wet naughty bits, I announced bravely from the privacy of the bathtub to Mr. W, “I’m finally saying it. I’m an exhibitonist, and obviously a voyeur too. I’m owning it. This is me.” Duh. It was a little anticlimactic. I’ve always know that I wanted to stand out, and I’ve always wanted to connect with others over kink. Most of my life, I haven’t allowed myself to do so, but it’s been engrained from the start. I have new readers, so many of you haven’t heard my stories of sitting around with friends and neighborhood kids at my yellow and orange Playskool plastic picnic table, asking them to tell me about their spankings. Most would, eager to share their experiences. We were kids, so it was hand spankings, mom’s wooden spoons, and the very rare and shocking daddy’s belt. Boy did I wonder about that last one, it sounded so mean and intense. Sometimes we moved on before it was my turn and I was relieved, or if we got to me I’d make something up. I’d never been spanked. All I had were their real life experiences and my fantasies about them. All these kids really knew about me regarding spanking was that I was fascinated, perhaps obsessed. As just an innocent seven year old, I was given a lead role in the annual second grade Thanksgiving play, which was always a big deal in my school. I was cast as Mother in “Back to the Future at the Garrison House.” It was 1985 and “Back to the Future” had been the hit movie that summer, so naturally, our play was about time-traveling to the 17th century. Wild West my butt, Back to the Future III. We did it first and we took it farther back. In my colonial New England town, we had two historical buildings that were named for what they were - The Little Red Schoolhouse and The Garrison House. Later in town history, we built a ginger ale factory and named it after the town - Chelmsford Ginger Ale. Pilgrims - not great with making ginger ale or at naming things, considering the town name itself is a town in England, as are pretty much all the other townnames in Massachusetts, except for those with Native American origins. One thing about growing up in a colonial town with colonial events and “growing up colonial” history lessons is that you can’t avoid corporal punishment, especially when talking about school or how children should behave at home. I already knew from children’s literature that spanking was to be expected as a part of life - who didn’t want to be whipped by Pa’s strap in “Little House in the Big Woods,” or take a turn as “The Whipping Boy?” Then I had my friends and neighbors confirming my suspicions. Spanking was already everywhere for this little bookworm and schoolgirl voyeur. So what’s a girl to do when she finds out she’s playing a Pilgrim Mama and this is her big line in the school play? “GET TO BED CHILDREN, OR IT WILL BE THE SWITCH FOR YOU!!!” I had to say this to my friends, my classmates! In my black and white pilgrim dress and bonnett, clapping my hands after the line to indicate the sound of impending smacking. I knew what a switch was, knew it was birch, knew my children would have had to go outside and cut the branch themselves. I get shivers remembering, and I get shivers telling you about it now. As I begin to explore switching and femdom, I feel like that little girl all over again, wanting so desperately to be spanked, standing up in front of the world and saying the opposite, knowing deep down it’s just as true. Ever since that play, when I felt exposed to but not actually seen by my school, my teachers, and my family, I have wanted nothing more than to be exposed and seen daily. I think I’ve been screaming since I was seven, “Will someone please see me for who I truly am?” I grew up smart and weird, polite and awkward, fitting in everywhere and nowhere. I found boyfriends to play at play spanking by the time I was an older teen, but until Mr. W, I never did feel fully seen. Once we’d played, I also knew I’d never been fully spanked until he came along. My life since then has been figuring out just how much a person needs to be seen. How much I need to be seen. Is one person knowing who you truly are enough? Can you live a life doing your best impersonation of yourself, and every now and again you get to be the complete you, only to tuck her away again, polite and tidy? Your friends might have a little piece, the internet might have a little anonymous piece, your family probably doesn’t know a damn thing about you. Do you even know yourself, if you spend so little time with the real you? Over the course of adulthood, I stopped knowing myself, and eventually lost myself completely. No, I didn’t just stop knowing myself - I hated the me I thought I was. Every now and again I’d pop out and how up here on the blog, but it got to the point where even Mr. W wasn’t getting to see the me that any of us know and love. Fortunately, when I feel good, I really love myself and I think I have an absolute treasure trove of knowledge, passion, compassion, and enthusiasm to share here, in the world of kink, and in the world at large. That is why it still feels powerful to say that three years ago, I started myself on a path to get myself back, which began with five days in a behavioral health facility (a mental hospital) in January 2016. It has been an absolute fight to be the me who writes this today, but here I am, about to turn forty-one, and for the first time, more than ever in my life, I feel seen on a daily basis. Most importantly, I see and love myself. Every. Single. Day. Mr. W has loved every version of me because he knows that it’s always been me on the inside. I can finally look back on my life and love every version of me too, because whether I’ve been in hibernation, incubation, or secret old spanking videos, it’s all led to now, Abby standing on her little red soapbox, announcing this, that, and the other thing. I’m publishing this! I’m selling that! I’m getting spanked! I’m writing smut! And here’s my butt! Hello, Voyeur. I’m Abby, Exhibitionist. Voyeur. Spanko. Monogamous kink player. Erotica writer. Vintage smut librarian and purveyor of filth. Ass worshipper and worshippee. Goddess. Seven year old Abby was ashamed and embarrassed of listening to her school friends’ spanking stories and threatening to thrash them on stage. Forty-one year old Abby is proud and literally aroused to say the world is her stage and she is ready to be its star. That’s how good it feels to say this to anyone willing to listen/read/watch/experience. I am so happy you’re here. I couldn’t do any of this without you. I definitely couldn’t have made it here without Mr. W. I love you more than anything, Mister. Thank you for walking beside me when we are balanced, carrying me when I fall, and celebrating me when I rise. I wouldn’t have anywhere near as sexy a story to tell without you.

Becoming My Fetish Incarnate

If you're not up for reading - more welty bruisy pics below. But I'd love if you read my love letter to spanking as it slowly begins to consume more and more of my time and life. xoxo, Abby


I am overwhelmed with a renewed sense of desire, as if on the verge of something so illicit and delicious that my skin can barely stand the anticipation. An underlying but constant distraction keeps my mind and nerves abuzz. I get through the day but the thrum in the shadows grows louder and stronger and faster - I have become lust incarnate for a thing I cannot possess.

I crave this thing called Spanking. I want to live inside it, taste it, fuck it, be it, know it like an acolyte knows the meaning behind the meaning behind the meaning of a favorite prayer.

Suddenly I'm writing again. I have ideas for stories. I'm putting together collections. As you know, I've been more comfortable posting photos of myself as well, either spanked or just in celebration of the body and the bottom. Mr. W is working on a number of spanking-related projects that I hope to be sharing with you here soon. We've started going out smut hunting again, and looking for pervertibles, and just being in the mind-space all the time. It's starting to feel like we're always turned on.

For too long, spanking has been a core part of each of our identities, but we haven't allowed it to be front and center. Yet, if you asked each of us privately, it is THE thing that makes us each who we are. And if you asked us together what makes us amazing as a couple, if we were comfortable enough to say so, we'd tell you it's because we not only complement each other's fetish, we ARE each other's fetish. He is my top and everything I would want that to be. I am his bottom.

Starting next week, I've actually adjusted my work schedule so that I have more time to write and play and share all this with the world that knows what I'm talking about. And I want to be an advocate for spanking play! This blog contains eleven years of (on-and-off) writing about understanding why I am like this. I am at long last through with that. I am like this. I think things are about to get really good.

The pic at the top and these here below are from playtime with the strap and cane with Mr. W last night. I wrote the above yesterday but didn't get a chance to post it. Then all this happened. One of my "vignettes" to tell you the dirty details will be coming up in the next few days.

Afterwards, I asked him if he had a favorite moment or part from what we'd just done, but in true brat fashion I was too excited to tell him my favorite to let him answer. "My favorite part," I told him, "was when  you had my in - for lack of a better term - diaper position on the edge of the bed, and the strap really hurt and I started wiggling. You grabbed my legs and did your best to hold me in place, but you let me cry and twist and turn." That twisting and turning resulted in some of the welts you see on my left leg - truly my own misbehaving fault! "There was a moment in there when I realized you were just going to let me cry and squirm and I just let go and existed purely in that moment."

"My favorite moment," he replied, "was that same moment, when I felt you let go."

I'm writing up this last bit early this morning and I have the most delightful shivers. Someone's going in to work wet today.

A Collection of O

 I first read the classic erotic novel The Story of O in the summer of 1999 during hours worked in the basement computer lab of my college library. Obsessed with knowing the thoughts of like-minded readers at the time, I printed out the entirety of Amazon's customer comments on the classic title. I just found the print-outs yesterday while looking for another part of my collection, an article from The New Yorker magazine, that appears below. As for the comments, they are dated March 3 1997 - August 9 1999. I haven't reread them yet, but I can see a follow-up post coming soon if there is anything of interest. Imagine! The thoughts of fellow readers, some surely with a spanking obsession much like ourselves, and the voices they used in 1999! This discovery feels historical. I can't wait to dig through these pieces of internet, literary, and bdsm history.

The article that appears here in 9 photographs (please use the enlarge feature on your device) is also from the basement of my college library. As a bibliophile, I know better than to destroy or steal library property. As a young woman blossoming into her sexual identity, I carefully removed the article from both the magazine and its rightful library home. So spank me. Smiley face!

"The Unmasking of O" by John De St. Jorre delves into the heart and secret life of Dominique Aury, the woman behind the nom de plume Pauline Reage. It also features the art of Guido Crepax from the 1975 graphic novel adaptation of Story of O, which I am regretful is not part of my collection, as it is no longer in print and is now a collector's item in its various printed productions. The article, originally printed in 1994, is worth the read. 

A third piece from my collection that I will share today is a new find. We went out smut hunting yesterday - thrift and used bookstore shopping for treasures, and this was amongst our spoils. The 1959 edition that appears at the top of this post is from another such day of erotic questing. The new one is fantastic! It's a printing from 1967 by Collectors Publications in California, who interestingly claim the motion picture rights on the copyright page (see below). This porn is ours! This one includes a Preface that reads like a carnival barker announcing the prizes that lie within these pages: "THE STORY OF O is a tragic, sick love tale. It is a story of man's inhumanity to man. O does not necessarily typify womankind. What she does epitomize is shown by her name - O, meaning, cipher, zero, NOTHING."  It screams trailer for an exploitation film or circus ringleader announcing the next act. Later editions insist upon a sort of sanctity, a respect to both the woman who wrote it and its place in the annals of erotica. This one delights in its tragic salaciousness.

Also of note is the back panel of the book - an advertisement for the complete collected and unabridged eleven volumes My Secret Life, which many of us know now as a single volume, My Secret Life - An Erotic Diary of Victorian London. I would love to get my hands on these individual volumes! The more erotica on our shelves the better.

A Little (a Lot) About Me

While reading Love our Lurkers posts, I thought about my future lurkers, now that I am committed to being back. I realized that I pretty much picked up where I left off, so unless you read me way back when, it might be hard for new readers to get to know me. I was especially inspired by Still LOL Days and Our Beginning over at Fondles' blog because as a new reader it was a great introduction. I'd like to do something similar for you, current readers and potential future lurkers. So here we go.

Origins

I've always been fascinated by spanking, all the way back to being five or six years old and asking my friends to tell me about their punishments. My parents didn't spank - in fact, they didn't punish at all. I was expected to manage myself and if I failed to do so, I was told "I'm sure you're punishing yourself enough," as if I was just expected to carry the weight and guilt of my mistakes. Is it any surprise I love being turned over Mr. W's knee now? It's such a relief to just let go.

Lifestyle

That being said, we call spanking "playing" and though he has always been my top and I have always been his bottom, he doesn't punish me for real misdeeds. Mr. W has held the same lifelong fascination that I have and we both enjoy the sensual and sexual elements of spanking and all that goes with it - the authority and submission, the implements, the positions, and yes, the punishments. I am his young lady and he is my Sir, and when we are in these roles, he can make up any misdeed he wants to punish me for, and anything goes. I've been "punished" for everything from being so late that he forgot to wear a watch to being an apple thief.

How We Met and How We Got Here

We met working at the Barnes & Noble in Calabasas, CA in late winter of 2003, both of us then in our mid-twenties. We'd confessed our spanking fetishes in the Customer Service booth of the bookstore and had been obsessed with one another ever since - but I had a boyfriend, he had a girlfriend. Then they both broke up with us in the same week - and one of the reasons mine broke up with me was my friendship with Mr. W. We spent the summer hanging out together, madly in love but neither of us able to be in a relationship. This is how it came to be that he caned me before he kissed me. We slept side by side, he bared my bottom. Then in the fall he moved to Oregon and I stayed behind.

Two years later, he came back to California, only to announce he was moving back to Oregon. However, we couldn't see each other because the guy I now lived with had worked in that same B&N with us, and was now my boyfriend. He'd been jealous of Mr. W back during that first summer and our relationship was on rocky footing and I was scared of what would or wouldn't happen next. So I told Mr. W I couldn't see him before he left again - and then, while my boyfriend went camping, I invited him to Disney Land, where we spent an amazing day and kissed for our first time under the fireworks while, I swear to goodness, "When You Wish Upon A Star" was playing. When my boyfriend got back from camping two days later, he took me to a park and - you guessed it - broke up with me. He thought I might want to move to Oregon with Mr. W.

Two years after that, I became Mrs. W. A month after getting married, I became Abby. I started this blog as a wedding gift. He had just discovered spanking blogs and had shared them with me, and I knew from the moment I realized what they were that I wanted to write one too. It feels both like Mr. W and I were always destined for each other, and destined to bring our love of spanking to the world.

Did You Really Make Spanking Videos?

Yes, we really did. In 2008 and 2009, we decided that the blog was going well and both of us had always had a secret desire to make a spanking video, so we made one. Then we made more. I called the series Naughty Abby, and for a time I even owned naughtyabby.com and sold video downloads there. I've made them available on Clips4Sale and there's a link in the sidebar if you're curious - please note, they control the prices but even though they're SD, I stand by these videos. We worked really hard on them. Mr. W did an amazing job of editing two video and audio feeds into one film, and I did my best job of putting my bum out there for all to enjoy. I didn't know how to feel about these videos for a few years, but I'm proud of them now.

My Disappearances

I have been living with major depression for most of my life. It got really bad five or six years ago, and though I was seeing a doctor and trying to find the right anti-depressant, I was also ruining my chances of finding the right medication by self-medicating. That is, I was drinking more, then more, and then finally all the time. Then I'd quit and try to pull myself together and get back to writing and living and caring. Then one day I'd start again. It cycled like this for years, medications and doctors and periods of sobriety and even a five day stay in a hospital for mental health so that I could medically detox and get started on a recovery program. There was absolutely no spanking at the mental institute and that makes this paragraph all the more depressing, doesn't it? The point is, I wasn't writing because I couldn't write. We weren't playing because it was unsafe. So I disappeared.

The happy ending to this story is that I am one year and three months sober. I am on the right medication and my heart doesn't always feel broken. Mr. W and I are stronger and better than ever, all the way down to our orgasms, no joke. I don't have a lot of sexy stories from the time I was away, but now that I'm back writing, that means we're back to playing, which means I get to tell the world the dirty details, because I really do love writing about spanking.

What's Next

I created an e-book of my favorite posts from this blog, but I haven't published it yet because I am an absolute chicken. I went through the whole Amazon Kindle process and everything. I just want to give you something perfect, and I'm terrified it isn't perfect.

I want to write a collection of erotic poetry about butts, perhaps inspired by artwork, namely photos of bottoms, both spanked and unspanked.

I have fiction to write. I have so many story beginnings, it's time I flesh them out and give you a spanking heroine who isn't me. Nah, she'll probably still be me in disguise.

We're also working on a small business venture. More to come on that!


So that's the general scoop. I am happy to answer questions, even about the more sensitive subjects, as long as they are respectful. I am also open to email at abby.schoolhouse@gmail.com. If you're going through anything, maybe I can help, or at least be someone to listen. And thanks for listening to me!

Time for a Spanking

When I first started blogging, I was as much trying to understand my love of spanking as I was trying to share it. "Why do I like this?" I would ask myself. I didn't need to understand the fetish or what anyone else liked - it was all about me.

In one of my first posts, The Weight of the World, I wrote about spankings as a reset button, a way to let go of the things that were stressing me out so I could carry on:

And when I do break, when I do begin to weep silent slow tears, then sob, when I can't hold back a cry with every stroke, when I know I've built up to it, have earned it, have struggled through every part of my mind and have released it all, I can let go. Every pain throughout the day is gone. Every familial agony and workplace drama is released in the whoosh of his chosen implement. Swish. I pay every bill in full.Crack. I am beautiful and striped and proud. Then, slice, I'm only a little girl. I'm only a little girl. With each stroke, this is all I know now. I collapse into him afterwards, this little girl fully punished, released of all her sins and the sins of those around her, and he holds me, curls around me, gently, whispering how proud he is of me. My hips begin to rise and writhe, pressing back against him even with the pain, and I am a woman, ready to carry the weight of the world once again.

Released of all her sins and the sins of those around her. Wow. I was not kidding about feeling like I carried the weight of the world.

I've long since let go of the idea that I am being personally punished during a spanking. It's sexy in fantasy, but we do not punish in our home. We play, even if we're playing at punishment. I don't list off real or imagined wrong-doings in my mind with each stroke. So besides mutual sexual pleasure with Mr. W, what do I get from a spanking now, if not temporary release from all the world's sins?

Making time for a spanking is making time for and about us. We get attention. Connection. We are fully focused upon one another. The space is set - door closed, implements laid out, clothes removed. The air is quiet, heavy with breath and anticipation but there is no music, no TV, no buzzing or beeping of phones. There is no one and nothing but us and the spanking, which in itself is an extension of us. We give it and each other our everything.

Spanking is perhaps one of the more zen sexual activities - you're in the moment, completely immersed. The top is aware of the bottom's physical and mental state, guiding the experience, ensuring both safety and satisfaction. The bottom is vulnerable but not a victim, consensual but not complacent. You don't just give or receive - together, two individuals become one spanking.

In the rush of daily life, there is traffic and work and then more traffic, groceries and pet supplies and pharmacies, dishes and carpets and yard work. After the must-do work of life, I still try to find time for the gym, to write, or to take a nice bath with epsom salts, because I am tired and thanks to the gym, I am always sore, and not in the fun bright-pink bottomed way. For Mr. W, after a day spent working with energy vampires, he still tries to find time to play his guitars, to work on his leather craft, or to just find a small spot of inner peace so that the things he really wants to do are possible.

Spanking can be exhausting for both partners, if you really give it your all and allow it to overcome your physical, emotional, and mental faculties. For a couple both trying to live their best lives as well as recover from the lives they've already lived up to this point, it can be daunting to even consider taking whatever ounce of strength you have left for the day and invest it in something that may leave you both unable to do much past snuggle and watch TV for the rest of the night. But that's the best kind of spanking! Pardon the pun, but I don't want a half-assed spanking. I want a full-assed, exhausting, arousing, three orgasms followed by dinner in bed kind of spanking.

As much as we wish the world was different, it can't be time for a spanking all the time. But when we do take the time, we give it and each other everything we have. There is nothing outside ourselves. No weight of the world, because there is no world. Just us. Just spanking. Just who we really are, and who we are together.



Image Source: Casemiro Arts - Peter Reiss on Society6. I just discovered both him and Society6 today while searching Google Images for "spanking clocks" for this post. Has a number of other art pieces also featuring the female bottom. On this one, "Fitness Time," I loved the curl of her left toes. I'm a toe-curler too. 

Ghostwriting

This name is a phantom more solid than my self. It appears; I fade to let it speak. It sings; eyes closed, I sway, enraptured.

Not “I” or “We” but “Abby’s back.”

A haunting returned –  let me be possessed.

Woman in the Tiger Cage

One of our recent spanking toy shopping trips took us to Smokin' Lingerie, a local adult shop with an interesting selection of spanking, BDSM, and impact play items. To give you an example, in addition to new merchandise, it also has back issues of Janus and videos from Rigid East on VHS. We've been there twice now and I end up wanting everything, even the items I wouldn't normally consider.

This time, I noticed they had a puppy cage, and not the kind you can get at Petsmart. It was large enough to fit a person on their hands and knees or lying down in a curled position. I surprised myself when I said to Mr. W, "I wouldn't mind being in that."


I've never had a desire to be caged, though the fantasy has occurred from time to time. I enjoy power exchange but not power deprivation. Even our wrist and ankle cuffs were purchased with safety in mind and I can escape them in an emergency. When I found myself picturing myself inside the cage, however, a small seed, one that I realize now was planted deep inside me long ago, began to grow.

I saw my first erotic image accidentally and at an early age, young enough that I didn't know what I was seeing. I'd gone along with my dad to the small package store near our house because when I accompanied him, I got a little package of Handi-Snacks cheese and crackers, the kind with the soft orange cheese and the red stick for spreading. It was almost all they sold: beer, wine, liquor, cheese and crackers, magazines.

If I let go of Daddy's hand, I was supposed to stay on the left side of the store. I'd tried and failed to get to the right side a few times, but always had my hand caught at the last moment. "That side is only for grown-ups," I'd been told, but as far as I could tell, except for the cheese and crackers, the whole store was only for grown-ups. Even the MAD magazine that was sold next to the Handi-Snacks at the register seemed like it was for grown-ups. The cartoons on the cover didn't look like the cartoons I watched on Saturday morning at all.

Then one fortuitous evening, it happened. My dad got caught up in his conversation with the clerk, one of Charlie's boys no doubt. Charlie's family owned the liquor store, the convenience store attached, and the creepy laundromat next door, but they were blue collar businessmen. My dad, a truck driver, was always happy to complain about taxes and the cost of gasoline with them.

As they rambled on about something well beyond my interest, I peeked around the corner. More magazines! At home I had drawers full of Sesame Street, 3-2-1 Contact, Highlights, and Ricky Ranger. Maybe they had a new issue of one of those I could look at while I waited. But no, these were not magazines I'd seen before, not even at the library or the grocery store. They were all about ladies - and the ladies were naked.

Right before my dad realized what I was looking at, one cover in particular caught my eye. As he rounded the corner, I looked up at him, forgetting that I was standing where I wasn't supposed to be. "Daddy, why is that lady in a cage?" I asked.

She was on her hands and knees, hay strewn around her, hair in a mass of wild strawberry blond tangles around her snarling face. She was fierce and beautiful. I didn't think the cage would hold her long.

My dad, like any good parent, grabbed the first answer out of thin air, and I realize now that it's why I've remembered her being in a "tiger cage" all these years, the rational part of my brain not recognizing that there is not necessarily so specific a thing without that particular animal inside it, too. "She's pretending to be a tiger," he told me, gently guiding me back to the front side of the register.

After seeing the puppy cage at Smokin' Lingerie, I couldn't shake the memory of the magazine cover. She was trapped, but I saw strength and power in her, as if she'd allowed herself to be ensnared, as if it was for her own pleasure, not for the owner of the cage. Or perhaps she was the owner of the cage herself. She became an archetype I would compare myself to for decades - the voluptuous woman who appears to be in peril, but remains undeniably strong. I wanted that secret voluptuous tiger woman strength for my own.

I wondered what I would do now as the woman in the tiger cage. I have known the snarl, the primal scream buried deep inside, the rage of a beast who would have stared from the cage, daring viewers to come too close. They would step towards me and I would growl, perhaps even roar, until they retreated, only to pace enticingly, to shake my rump and my mane, to watch and wait, knowing they would return. It was impossible to know which was more fortunate, that they couldn't reach me or I couldn't reach them. But I am not that woman anymore.

Then, as that seed of interest in the cage sprouted, I imagined it filled with soft cushions rather than scattered with hay. I pictured it in light soft but bright enough to read by and a stack of books, notebooks, and pens just outside the bars but well within my reach. I pictured being released and bathed, my hair brushed, the kinks of my muscles massaged away before being returned to my safe haven. The only trouble with this cage is that it's unnecessary. I have all these things and I no longer feel like I'm in danger or a danger to others. No safe haven for me or from me necessary.

I tried to find the magazine online. I wanted to see if the cover lived up to my memory of her, if I'd lived up to the legacy I believed she'd handed me as a child to become a beautiful, terrifying, powerfully submissive and submissively powerful woman. I couldn't find her. After so many years and with no memory of the magazine's name, the woman in the tiger cage would be free to anonymously roam the newsstands of the early eighties in peace.

I came to realize that if we were to have the cage we saw at the sex shop, my secret voluptuous tiger woman strength would be my willingness to go inside it even after how long it's taken for me to become the woman outside the bars. Those bars would at last be tangible - cold, inflexible, locked from the outside, keeping the captive within. So unlike the invisible cages we make for ourselves, the ones we first must see before we can see or be ourselves outside them,

As for her legacy, only now do I see that I built that into my own invisible cage. I stand outside it now, a woman of my own breed with a sharpened nail to pick the lock of any cage that captures me. Sometimes I enjoy climbing inside, but I move to and from each cage in freedom.

My Faire Flogger

A few weekends ago, I went to a Renaissance faire for the first time in eighteen years. Unlike my twenty-year old self, I didn't dress up, nor did Mr. W or his mom, leaving only his teenage cousin costumed in a velvet cape that dragged in the sand and covered a jester's costume that was more Harley Quinn than courtly fool.

I'd felt awkward about not being in costume, despite the many other families in jeans and comfortable walking shoes. However, it turned out that the Arizona Renaissance Festival is much larger than King George's Faire back in Boston, and in a great deal more direct sunlight, so the casual weekend wear turned out to be a wise choice. Walking around in those jeans and sneakers, though, I realized that it wasn't the lack of costume that made me feel awkward, it was that I no longer considered myself a person who would wear a costume, even one of questionable historical correctness. The version of me who would craft a velvet dress adorned in ribbons, going so far as to sew a push-up bra into the lining for that classic cleavage-like-a-bum-crack look, then tightly bind a waist-cinch around it had been gone for so long, I had forgotten she'd left.



Exploring the village booths and performances, Mr. W and I made notes of where we'd like to go back to explore if we could get away from his family. We were enjoying being out with them - the trip was part of his cousin's birthday gift - but as we noticed floggers, whips, and books about medieval torture instruments, we knew we'd need some time alone if we hoped to leave the faire with any souvenirs other than handmade rose-scented soap.

Finally, after a lunch of soup in bread bowls, we left them at rest in the shade. As we walked, we talked about the costumes on the attendees who had dressed up. In addition to garb that possibly could have fit somewhere into the Renaissance, a period of time that spanned four hundred years and the European continent, there were pirates, vikings, fairies, a woman who may have been cosplaying Xena the Warrior Princess, and quite a few patrons in either classical Victorian get-up or its steampunk variation. We were startled at one point when Mr. W was greeted by a tree. It had looked like a prop, but it was, in fact, the Green Man.

"I was worried I was going to be uncomfortable coming here because I wouldn't fit in," I told Mr. W as we walked and talked. "I thought everyone was going to look down on me because we aren't in costume." Unsure but hopeful, I then added quietly, "I forgot I was one of them. I think I might be starting to feel like me again."

We reached the stand-alone wooden shop for Rena's Leather, where we'd seen the floggers, along with viking helmets, leather purses, and unusual items. Family-friendly environments are not usually conducive to spanking toy shopping, but I was at last feeling more confident, and the vendor did, after all, bring spanking toys to the family-friendly environment, so I walked right up to the display and began stroking the falls of a variety of floggers. I think Mr. W would have been content to let me shop, but finding one that was soft and supple to the touch, I beckoned him over to see what he thought.

"It's pretty light, but it's super soft," I told him, touching it along with him. The moment I spoke, one of the shopkeepers volunteered, "If you're looking for something heavier, this one is probably the heaviest we have here right now."

I stroked it first, then as I nodded, Mr. W tested its texture and weight as well. "It's buffalo bull leather," the shopkeeper advised. It only had nine falls, but I'd been considering something simple, shorter and softer than our other two floggers, something we could play with to determine if we were interested in growing our flogger collection, especially when some of the floggers we've been looking at online are as much an investment as they are a tool for sensual exploration. The price tag on this one was minimal, and short of actually being flogged at the faire, this did make an ideal souvenir. We made the purchase and tucked it carefully into my bag so we wouldn't be asked what we bought when we met back up with the other half of our party.

The whips turned out to be more for spectacle than for spanking, and the torture books, though compelling, cost more than I wanted to spend, so we met back up with our family and headed home, all of us exhausted from walking and sun and personal rejuvenation. That last one may have just been me, as I decided on the way home that next year I would have a costume at the ready by the time the festival reopens in February.

The faire flogger, however, was not content to simply go home and join the other toys in the cabinet. It still contained a spirit of renaissance within it, and was not about to let that spirit go unreleased.

It was two weeks later when we finally had a chance to bring the flogger out for play. We'd been uncertain what we were in the mood for, spanking or only sex, light play or heavy play, role play or just us. I suggested the faire flogger because it was new and light and soft, something I thought we could use as a gentle starter and see where it took us. He agreed. We were already naked, so I presented the full length of the back of my body to him on the bed while he fetched the flogger from the cabinet.

He began softly, the falls barely a whisper on my skin. It felt heavenly. He dragged it lightly over me, almost tickling me, then gently whipped it against me, hardly a stroke, just a quick rush of soft leather. He continued that pattern, lightly and softly, then increased the pressure and speed. I wasn't sure if I was ready to go harder yet, but I pressed on, sure I would fall into the rhythm.

Even with just the nine falls, the flogger landed on my backside with a lovely thud, though its slenderness did bring out a sting as well. Mr. W was switching between a steady stream of medium strokes and taking a moment to rub the sting from my skin, but each time he began flogging anew, I had trouble matching my breath to the rhythm. I adjusted my hips. I told myself, Any moment, any moment, you'll find it. "It" being that perfect space, the one where the pain is pleasure, where I'm riding it, craving it, holding it and releasing it like breath itself.

I didn't say anything. I kept trying to break through to my headspace, subspace, my perfect place. He let the flogger fall lower, striking the tops of my thighs and the sweet spot. He whipped it up and down my bottom rather than side to side. I was holding very still, often holding not just my body but my breath. I was trying not to make any sound, biting down on a blanket even though I wasn't actually in pain. Then, just as I felt my skin start to warm to where I wanted it, as I started to think, I'm getting there, he stopped. He knew something wasn't right. My breathing wasn't balanced, my body wasn't reacting the way it normally does.

He was right. I wasn't there yet, in that headspace I was craving. I was trying to force it. I should have said then, "I can't get there right now. Come hold me. Come touch me. Come be inside of me." Anything but what I said instead, "Let me push through. Let me keep going."

When we talked about it later, we confessed that we were each trying to please the other. I thought he wanted to keep spanking me. He thought I wanted to push through and find that space. It's happened before. What neither of us realized was that even if that's what the other person wanted, it didn't have to be right then. We could take a break for an hour or a day or however long it took before we had a chance to start again. Instead, we did try for a little while longer, but we finally both gave up, feeling uncomfortable in our own skins and disappointed that we hadn't pleased the other person.

It was the following morning that Mr. W discovered the two spanking and BDSM podcasts I mentioned in my last post. Lo and behold, the first order of business in both of them is communication. We hadn't even realized that it was something we could do better. We have the same fetish. We're the perfect opposite sides of the same coin. We haven't had an awkward spanking experience in a very long time - that is, not until that little flogger came into our house. Now, in the week and a half it's been since it worked its magic, we can't stop talking, planning, experimenting. We are in an era of renewal and discovery.

I am looking forward to the next time the faire flogger comes out of the cabinet. What other tricks does it have up its hilt? If it continues to work changes upon us, the next thing you know I'll be writing about how we've decided to try switching roles and now sometimes I'm the top and he's the bottom. That would take some magic! Or would it?

From the Inside Out

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Every Ordinary Object

To hear us tell it now, we knew we'd be married the moment Mr. W was introduced as my new co-worker at Barnes & Noble. If not then, we certainly knew shortly thereafter, when at the Information Desk, I revealed with a blush that I had a fascination with spanking and he confirmed the same about himself. The only difference was that he was a top and I was a bottom. Things almost couldn't have been more ideal.

The universe immediately began shifting our lives into proper order. My boyfriend broke up with me and his girlfriend broke up with him four days later, neither of whom were into spanking. We began spending all our time with each other immediately. The only problem with our new found freedom was that we weren't ready to date. We weren't even ready to kiss. We were, however, ready to begin our adventures together.


He took me to my first hockey game and on the way, we stopped at the beach so I could watch the late afternoon sun sink into the Pacific Ocean, something I hadn't had a chance to do even after a year on the West Coast. We listened to classic country as we drove around Southern California during fire season. He maneuvered a car with a suddenly dead radiator from the left lane across six lanes of traffic to get off at the next exit, all with the entire right side of the freeway engulfed in flame. We watched another sunset, a field of violet and orange blooming before us, as Willie Nelson's Stardust album played and we talked between the most comfortable silences I'd ever known.

One night, we were nostalgic for the days when books written by Anonymous still appeared on the shelves of regular bookstores. We went on a quest that became a tour of L.A.'s adult entertainment shops, everything from LGBQT-friendly Circus of Books to a shady hole in the wall with that kind of arcade in the back to the nationally known Pleasure Chest. Driving between these nefarious destinations, he told me stories that weren't just pieces of L.A.'s history, they were pieces of his own. Clubs where he'd played with his band. Bookstores and record shops he'd nearly lived in, safe havens and bastions of sanity. Pieces of conversations he remembered as we passed this old building or that shadowed corner. We did eventually find a few erotic titles, even in the BDSM genre, but we didn't buy any. There wasn't anything in those books that he hadn't given me that night - a strong man to show me the ropes, a fantasy to fall into, a longing for when those two would finally be combined.

During this same summer, now almost thirteen years ago, we discovered a hobby we continue to this day. It began with his need for a new belt. As booksellers at a national chain, none of us made very much, so when he asked if I wanted to go shopping with him for a belt, we started off in thrift stores. Suddenly, with him at my side, every ordinary object had alternate possibilities. Wooden spoons and butter paddles, dull with use and time, now glimmered with possibilities of domestic kitchen discipline. Framed calendar pages featuring bare-bottomed pin-ups made us whisper and wonder about the stories of the people who eventually decided to give up this handcrafted erotica to charity. Then there were the clothes.

There were girls' school uniforms in high school sizes that would fit an adult woman, with real school uniform labels and plaids in the appropriate school colors. This was Los Angeles, after all. Nobody wants to go to public school. In most of the school-focused spanking scenarios I've encountered or dreamed up myself, nobody goes to public school either.

There were medical scrubs and hospital gowns, for doctor and naughty nurse scenarios, or perhaps even doctor-patient. No straight-jackets, but my asylum fantasies were nonetheless present as I imagined just how Mr. W - ahem, a doctor, musn't get ahead of myself because we still hadn't kissed - might try to cure me of my spanking fetish.

And of course, there were the belts. In all shades of leather, in all lengths, weights and degrees of wear, they hung on display hooks like a selection of sadism in a mean uncle's woodshed. He tried a few on, first folding them over and snapping them, startling not only a few customers with the sharp cracks as we giggled and blushed. Eventually, he found one that fit, its brown leather soft and supple, the loop of its fold nearly flat. I still remember which store we bought it from, the wall where it was hanging, the giddy sense once we reached the car that we'd bought our first leather spanking toy together.

It would still be two years before our first kiss, and those years would be spent a thousand miles apart. But ever since, our favorite past-times haven't changed. We go for long drives and tell each other stories. If we're not together for a stunning sunset, we call each other just to say, "Go outside, it's beautiful!" We revel in adult stores, from exploring local shops in person to delving into the international world of spanking implements online. Our favorite, though, is seeking those objects, ordinary and extraordinary, that sit side by side with salt-and-pepper shakers, Depression glass, rotary telephones, and taxidermy. The objects that make his hand graze my bottom as he leans in breathe against my ear, "Just imagine how that would feel on your backside, young lady." The objects that could belong on our bookshelf, in our cabinet, or on our walls. Even the ones that make us laugh and wonder what stories they could tell. These stray pieces of other people's lives magnify a core piece of our own life together.

So, the next time you donate to Goodwill or decide to set up a booth in an antique mall, remember there will be those - young and old, friends and lovers alike - who will be browsing for those ordinary objects as well as the not-so-ordinary ones. They'll take them home, clean them up, and possibly treasure them for the rest of their lives. Thirteen years later, they just might be reminiscing gratefully about that time they were just two broke and broken-hearted booksellers with a need for an inexpensive belt.

Having Been Spanked

I'm still enjoying grabbing still shots from my old Naughty Abby movies. I had quite thoroughly been spanked (and hand-tawsed) in this one, Please Not My Hands.

By Tuesday morning, the soreness from my four weekend spankings was already less noticeable. The fifty-minute drive to work was accomplished with minimal repositioning and my bargain-priced office chair was only uncomfortable in the usual way. I was disappointed.

I’d carried a sore and sexy sense of accomplishment on Monday, so pink and tender, reminded constantly of my thrashings. That morning, in response to Mr. W asking how my bottom was feeling, I’d pulled my skirt up and my stockings down for him in the kitchen, even though it was only minutes before I had to leave for work. He’d been about to pour some coffee but as I bent over to show him how I was finally welted and bruised from the previous night’s caning session, he accidentally knocked his empty mug over instead. If it hadn’t been a Monday, I think that I would have opted to just stay home as he drew me to standing position and kissed me in a definitely non-Monday morning fashion. Employers understand if an employee has to call in “spanked and ready for more” instead of just plain old “sick,” right?

Tuesday brought a different flavor of craving. I wasn’t thinking about sexy spankings and taking the moment in the kitchen into the bedroom as I’d been the day before. As I found myself trying to work but only feeling an absence of discomfort, I kept thinking that I wanted another session to bring me back to where I’d been. We should have done a Night Five after all, I thought to myself, but I thought it the way one might think, realizing sobriety has come too soon, I should have had another when I had the chance. Now I had to start all over again.

The emotions I was having over missing having been spanked within the last twenty-four hours seemed extreme to the logical side of me. I sent a text to Mr. W. “I think I’m crashing. I can’t remember which hormones get released in response to pain, but I think I’ve run low. I wish I could have just one more spanking.”

“I can help with that!” Mr. W wrote back.

It’s been a long while since we played this hard or this much, and I had forgotten how addicting that feeling of having been spanked can be. When I first started blogging, then-spanking model Niki Flynn had a quote on her blog that read something like, “I don’t like being spanked. I like having been spanked.” I always identified with this. It’s not the pain itself, it’s giving in to receiving it, and then, afterwards, knowing that I had taken it, that I‘d made it through. This desire for the experience of submitting to and succeeding at receiving the pain of a spanking lives at the very core of me.  Even when I experienced a phase of being wary of receiving pain on purpose, spanking was still the subject of every single fantasy I had.

I crave having my panties pulled down, being placed in position, being turned first pink, then red, then striped. I want to be consumed by a hard flash of agony that becomes white light behind my closed eyes. I want to scream in silence, then moan low and long so that it’s not the pain that is public but the arousal that comes the moment the quick sharp reaction to the pain ends and the realization that it has faded and I am safe begins, only to have it happen again, over, and over, and over.

Then, before we move on to anything else, be it sex, dinner, or just regular life, I want to lie for a moment, held in warm arms, breath soft and comforting against me as I sob, or tremble, or just lie quietly still, knowing that I am complete, that I am strong, that I am alive - that I have been spanked.

Lost Language

From Joseph Campbell's commentary in Pantheon Books' The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales:

The "monstrous, irrational and unnatural" motifs of folk tale and myth are derived from the reservoirs of dream and vision....They are thus phrases from an image-language, expressive of metaphysical, psychological, and sociological truth. And in the primitive, oriental, archaic, and medieval societies this vocabulary was pondered and more or less understood. Only in the wake of the Enlightenment has it suddenly lost its meaning and been pronounced insane.

This was once a spanking blog. In my writing, I pondered the "monstrous, irrational and unnatural" motifs of spanking , told stories, explored my own desires and dreams, and by it, I thought I understood myself and my place in the universe. Then I deleted it all, the vocabulary of spanking having lost its meaning, the cruelty and injustice inherent in the fetish pronounced, silently and by my heart, at least in part insane.

It didn't leave my fantasies, of course. The same cruelty and injustice inherent in the fetish are inherent in me, and my orgasms have always been coupled with the victimization of flesh. It didn't leave our bedroom, where, though we play less often than we did, I still sometimes talk a dirty caning story into reality. I may now only take six strokes where I used to take three dozen, but it all comes down to the same truth: you can take the girl out of the fetish community, but you can't take the fetish out of the girl.

Going back to Cambell's statement about the motifs of myth, I think fetishes can be seen as an image-language as well. They have an innate truth, but once we start to analyze them and break them down, as we do with most everything in modernity, the language is lost. If there was one question I tried to answer in the old version of this blog, it was "Why am I like this?" I come into writing this now with the answer: "Because this is the way I am." I can't question it any longer. It's like taking "Hansel and Gretel" and trying to place it at a certain point in history. There are dark and wild things in the wood, and some of them want to eat us, but the architect of the little house that was built of bread and covered in cakes never registered those blueprints. There is truth, and there is Truth. One we can prove. The other just is.

I watched the first twelve episodes of Grimm this week on Hulu, while I've been home with the flu. You can credit it, along with a fever, for my writing now, because it reminded me of the passion I once had for folklore, for retelling the old tales, for finding the Truth and presenting it in a new way, especially if that way was one that would result in erotic titillation. The premise is that the stories collected by the Grimm Brothers were true, that the creatures, the animal-people and the wicked witches, the things that go bump in the night, were real, and the Grimm family were supernatural humans who hunted them. It's the opposite of Campbell's statement above. It's the idea that the dreams and vision are the reality; believing the stories are only stories will get you killed.

It's an interesting take and I'm enjoying the show, but it limits the scope of the folktales it sources. For one thing, all the creatures are named something Germanic, which would indicate that all monsters come from Germany, except for one type that appears to be from France. Now, if that was reality, you might be a pig creature born in Laos, but you'd still be called a Bauerschwein. That doesn't seem fair. Folktales are, by nature, nondescript. They could happen anywhere, anytime. By taking a metaphor and turning it into fact, the entire world is limited by the new language.

I don't want to limit myself any longer. I have just spent a year living within the confines of a collection of stories that is meant to be factual and infallible, but it's like living inside a Grimm collection. The problem in my heart, and why I cannot abide by a collection of stories is this: I know that not all the monsters are real. There is truth, and there is Truth. We are the Bauerschwein. We are the demons. The image-language of myth is universal, timeless. It may not be fact, but it is reality. The world is so much more than we allow it to be.

The things I like about spanking, the exposition of bare flesh, the relinquishing of the body and the will, the suffering but not the pain, the forgiveness implied by the punishment, are not facts of the fetish. Those may be completely different from what anyone out there likes about this sexual subset. They are derived from my personal experience and concept of what spanking should be. They are not necessarily what it should be for anyone else, and what you want, want you crave in your heart of hearts, your bottom of bottoms or your top of tops, may not be truth for me.

Somewhere along the way I lost my language and tried to give everything a new name, but the names were wrong and the stories weren't mine. I'm now, I hope, taking my reality back. I'm just at the edge of it, learning to speak and learning to see this image-language, culled forth from dreams.

Suffering to Sooth the Soul, or, Assedia & Me

Although I have long since come to terms with my fascination with and craving for the pain of a good hard spanking, in all its various forms and by means of all its various implements, I still ponder the reasons why I like what I like and why I want what I want. I've expounded on theories over the years - the need to relinquish control, the healing power of tears, the reversion of woman to child in order to fully embrace the identity of woman once again - but I haven't settled on any one reason. I don't think there is or can be such a thing. And yet, through my casual reading I've developed another theory. Let's add escape from spiritual ennui to the mix.

I'm currently reading Acedia & Me by Kathleen Norris, author of the monastic memoir The Cloister Walk. In Acedia & Me, she explores the concept of acedia, a sort of boredom of the soul that was once considered the eighth "bad thought" in the philosophy of the early Christian desert monks. The eight bad thoughts of the monks became the seven deadly sins of the church and acedia was subsumed by sloth, but sloth does not cover the greater meaning of acedia. Sloth, as we know, is the act of being lazy. Acedia, in contrast, describes the state of being detached from that which we once found meaningful because we have found it, or all things, to be meaningless. In suffering from acedia we might be lazy, yes, but it is because we can perceive no value in doing that which we are avoiding.

A simple example, for Norris as well as myself, is that of acedia and writing. A few years ago, I decided that every story has been told. I have never wanted to do anything but write. I call myself a writer. But having come to that decision, it's hard to find the motivation to write when I believe that all I am doing is regurgitating in text. I've been "working" on my collection of retold fairy tales for years. "Working" means I've started a few, thought about them, abandoned them. There are all ready so many retold fairy tales. Do I really have anything new to offer? A small piece of me knows that I do. The greater part of me has trouble finding the energy to waste on mimicry.

Early concepts of acedia were tied more closely to spiritual suffering and rejecting one's closeness to God. Essentially, it's the idea that God, or the Universe, or Life Itself, metaphorically comes to a person and says, "Here, have this gift. It is the gift of now and today and your presence in it." In response, the person says, "No thank you." It is Melville's Bartleby, having accepted a job and arrived to do it, proceeds to respond to each task with "I would prefer not to."

Early in the book, Norris considers acedia's etymology and word associations. In listing its synonyms, she lands on indolence and writes:

"Dolor is an ancient word for "pain," and indolence is the inability to feel it. We've now come close to the worst that acedia can do to us: not only does it make us unable to care, it takes away our ability to feel bad about that. If we can no longer weep, or desire, or feel pain or grief, well, that's all right; we'll settle for that, we'll get by." (p. 45)

From a masochist's perspective, what could be more terrifying than the inability to feel pain? Although the quote above refers moreso to internal pain and emotional suffering, I could not help but see the parallel between feeling pain and feeling alive, feeling as though I and my actions have purpose. I think my mental state after an experience of corporal punishment must be much like the feeling one has after sky diving or white-water rafting a dangerous river, or even after riding a particularly terrifying roller coaster. There is a life-affirming sensation of having survived. Is it too far-fetched to say that reaffirming the ability to feel pain can ease the spiritual suffering of acedia? If I accept pain, I accept feeling; if I accept feeling, I acknowledge presence; if I acknowledge presence, I accept implied purpose. If I accept implied purpose, I impart meaning.

In other words, if I am punished I will feel pain. Feeling pain grounds me in myself, a self I view first and foremost as a writer. Being present in myself, as a writer, I am meant to write, and if I am meant to write, then my writing, be it word or blog post or epic tome, cannot be meaningless. I am spanked therefore I am.

Of course, this entire theory does nothing to explain why I like the thought of others being spanked. I can honestly say that I have never watched a spanking video or read spanking erotica and thought to myself afterwards, "Well, my life now has purpose and my soul is no longer wretched and abject." Then again, reading and watching erotica does always make me want to write my own, so perhaps there is greater meaning in our dirty art forms after all.

Submission vs Obedience. Now featuring Bondage Puppies.

img (and bondage dogs for sale): www.honour.co.uk

When a pet-owner becomes exhausted by a rowdy canine, that dog might be sent to doggy day-care or obedience school, but even the kinkiest of us would probably take pause before sending a beloved pet to a school for submission. Submission School for Dogs sounds like a fetish-oriented pet care program, which may explain why I was unable to find a listing online for any canine training program with the word "submission" in its name. Apparently, even dog trainers know that submission is different from obedience. Why, then, is it so difficult to explain how one differs from the other? How do I know if I am submissive or just willing to follow commands?

I've been thinking about the disparity between these two concepts since MurasakiTeapot, kinky conversation starter and fellow fetishist in the Twitterverse, posed her Kink of the Day Question on Tuesday: "Submission vs. Obedience? Can you obey and not submit?"

I won't repost the whole thing here, but the course of the conversation can be followed on MurasakiTeapot's Twitter page if you go back far enough. I summed up my feelings with the theory, "Obedience is submission to a command. Submission is obedience to a person."

I'm going to approach my feelings on this from the perspective of sex and punishment, but not life and lifestyle. I know for certain that if I could never be the "s" in a D/s relationship, and I'm therefore not well-versed enough to consider that aspect of this subject. What I do know is that I've always considered myself to be sexually submissive, in the sense that I want to give up control. I want to be told what to do and how to do it, to be physically manipulated into the right position. My attitude takes on a "Do with me what you will" quality that can at times be crippling because it means I don't take initiative. I wait, because I fear I will do something dissatisfactory. In this sense, my submission greatly varies from obedience in that I have put my whole self and the entire scenario into my lover's hands. In waiting to take action because I am waiting to be told, I'm not actually obeying anything. I may, at times, even be preventing anything from happening at all. I haven't been told to wait. I haven't been told to fear. Those traits are intrinsic. Therefore, it seems I have answered the opposite of the original question. It is possible to be submissive without simultaneously being obedient.

Now consider a scene in which I am going to receive a spanking. Before the spanking itself, possibly for hours or days on end, I may have been literally begging for it. I most likely will have been pointing out, at times to an obsessive and irritating degree, exactly what I want and how I want it. No submission there. I do try to top from the bottom, I'm aware of it, and I know it's perceived as a big no-no, but I am nothing if not a series of diametrically opposed characteristiccs, and this just happens to be one of them. I've been told not to, and still I try to, pun intended, force my husband's hand. So no obedience in the spanking prequel. Apparently, I am just a very, very bad girl before my punishment.

When I want to be spanked, what happens to the sub from the bedroom? Why am I not that girl when it comes to discipline? Why do I suddenly want to take control and command my own spanking? My fear of behaving dissatisfactorily flies out the window. I have actually become aggravated with myself at times for wanting a spanking so badly that I am perfectly willing to ruin an otherwise peaceful but spank-free day by whining and pleading and then getting mad when I don't get my way. Mr. W is forced to prove his dominance by denying me the very thing I want. I realize this, and still I behave this way. So does that mean I really want the spanking, or I don't?

Fast-forward to the punishment. I bend where I'm supposed to, I take the strokes I'm meant to take, but I don't enjoy it. It hurts. I obey, but once it really starts to sting, I fight it, I wiggle away, I moan "please no more" into a pillow, I stamp my feet or kick or otherwise make a fuss. Inside my head, I'm wondering why I wanted this, why I'll be happy afterwards that it happened. In the moment I hate it, and I want it to stop, but when a new command is given, such as to reposition or to count the strokes, I obey. I'm mad about it, I don't want to do it, but I obey. Original question answered: Yes, it is possible to obey but not submit.

So where does this leave me? Do I need to learn to be both more dominant and more submissive? I think, in my case, the debate between obedience and submission is less relevant then the debate between my confidence as a spankophile and the tentativeness with which I approach other aspects of my life. As a spankophile, I know what I want, and won't rest until I get it. Is it really so easy as that? If I just knew what I wanted, and said what I wanted, would I get what I want as well? I don't think Mr. W even knows about the part of me that wants to fully submit, at least sometimes. He's so often exposed to Miss I Want My Way that he may not realize that Miss I Want Your Way to Be to Have Your Way With Me even exists.

I guess it comes down to three things. The first is that who I am sexually and who I am in terms of my spanking fetish really are two different entities. That is good to know, and something I had never considered separating until now. The second is that the theme song Mr. W picked for me when we first met still applies today, and I still laugh every time I hear Cheap Trick singing, "I want you to want me. I need you to need me. I'd love you to love me. I'm begging you to beg me." If nothing else, it seems he knew what he was getting into.

The third is that maybe I'm more submissive than I realized in the grand scheme, because what it all really comes down to is me saying not only "Dominate me" but also "I want so much to do what pleases you that I want to please you all the time, even when it might just be time to relax."

Next lesson: learning that submitting isn't really about what I want. And we're back to me considering D/s and realizing if I'm the "s" it's going to have to be a capital letter.