Cowboy Corner Time - Another Spanktiquing Adventure

The Pornhub/Cornhub April Fool's Day prank reminded me that I haven't posted about Cornfest 2015. That was back in July, before I returned to blogging. Fortunately, we always end up with a spanking-related story, and our Cornfest adventure was no exception.

We hadn't intended to go to Cornfest, two hours away in Camp Verde with not much in between here and there, but we were aching to get out of the oppressive Phoenix heat. Camp Verde is to the north and was forecasted to be cooler than home, with the added bonus of being hours away from everyone we knew. We could go for a drive, do some spanktiquing if we were lucky, and best of all, just breathe and be together.

The drive was relaxing, desert expanses on both sides changing from scrub to rocky hills to forests of cactus then back to scrub, mountains in stark relief off in the distance. When we arrived in downtown Camp Verde, we realized we weren't going to be there for very long. The festival was small, reminiscent of the Fourth of July fair in my little New England hometown. Neighbors commingled, chatting over fried dough and roast corn as their children raced around the craft and snack booths. Feeling like outsiders but happy to be walking around in the fresh air, we headed for the short downtown fairway, its shopping district consisting of gun shops, feed stores, and, wouldn't you know it, an antique store and trading post - Cowboy Corner.

Cowboy Corner turned out to be a melting pot of equestrian paraphernalia, decorative antiques, and general store oddities. They even had a barrel of leather straps.

In the equestrian area, we found a dogging bat we couldn't go home without. We've had one like it for a decade, but that one has a metal bar in the handle, leaving just the slapper free. The one at Cowboy Corner was completely leather and the texture of the leather was incredibly soft. I was dying to feel it tracing patterns on my bare backside followed by the swat of the double layer of leather in an over the knee or warm-up spanking. 

We also found a collection of leather conditioners. We've been needing one for ages, especially with our penchant for old leather and wood, and we figured the ones carried by a store specializing in leather equestrian goods would be worth checking out. We decided on Skidmore's Leather Cream, a handmade all-natural conditioner with beeswax. I'm adding their link to my Toys section because it has worked wonders on some of our antique leathers and it works beautifully on wood as well. I was worried about using anything on some of our more expensive or antique implements, but this one has turned out to be gentle and effective. I'd recommend it.

When we went to the counter, the clerk found our selection of the leather bat amusing. Apparently we didn't look like horse people. "She's going to use this at home!" he announced to us, the other clerk, and anyone else in the store, smacking the bat against his hand. He laughed a semi-toothless but genuine laugh. He looked us up and down. I'm slightly taller than Mr. W and I have more meat on my bones; I think the clerk might have thought I was the domineering type. "It don't hurt much, though, you see," he added. Then he started spanking his own butt with our new toy. We laughed and had absolutely no recourse to the conversation. We took our bag and headed the heck out of Dodge. 

Spank-tiquing - Brat Party

Superstition Mountains, view from Goldfield Ghost Town

We were trying to go to a few antique malls on the east edge of Mesa , out towards Apache Junction, but as we drove past windows dark and reflective in the bright morning sun, we realized we were an hour too early. At first we thought we'd wait it out, then decided to drive eastward again, just to explore. We were on a road that ran through an expanse of cactus dense as a cornfield when I announced I needed to pee.

We knew we weren't too far from civilization, so we continued onward towards small buildings we could see past the next rise. When we got there, we discovered they weren't real, though they weren't mirages. They were wooden facades, built to look like a small western town, trailers and debris hidden behind them. We laughed and turned left, seeing buildings that looked more substantial nearby.

One of them was an Elks Lodge, closed and of course I couldn't have used it as a rest stop anyway, but on a banner in front of the building was an advertisement for their annual Brat Party. Mr. W saw it too. "Well, looky there," he said, using the cowboy twang we fall into sometimes when we get out past suburbia and into land that's still more old west than new. "A brat party." Visions of bottoms of misbehaved ladies turned over stern knees danced through my head, and surely his, too, but I was the only one to blush at the thought.


Immediately I answered, "Not like that! It couldn't be."

He laughed. "What else could it be?"

My brain was so occupied with thinking that he thought it was a spanking party that I couldn't come up with anything. "Is it short for something they use on horses? Some kind of cowboy thing? I don't know!" There'd been a cowboy on the banner but I knew it couldn't really be a celebration of naughty cowgirls.

He glanced away from the road as we now headed up a hill, seemingly now farther from anywhere I would find a ladies room. "It's not like there's another word that is spelled the same but pronounced differently, is there?" I couldn't think of one. I truly couldn't think of one. He added, "What kind of sausage party were you expecting these cowboys to have?" I thought it was a bad joke and let it go.

Another collection of buildings rose up out of the desert. "I don't know if I'll be able to pee up there," I worried aloud.

"Let's just go see," he said. A sign came into view: Ghost Town 1/2 Mile. This trip was not going as planed. Moments later, we curiously turned in to Goldfield Ghost Town.

It turned out it was a genuine mining town near the Superstition Mountains and the less genuine fabled mine known as the Lost Dutchman. Goldfield was established in 1893 but abandoned by 1926 when it was clear the gold vein had run dry. It had since been turned into a historic stop on the Apache Trail, with restored original buildings now used as museums and gift shops, a tour of the historic Mammoth Gold Mine, and, blessedly, restrooms.

On our way back, we again passed the brat party sign. "I do wonder what that could be," I mentioned.

Mr. W's jaw went momentarily agape, then looked at me with concern. "Yes, I wonder what that could be, at their barbecue. What kind of sausages they might have. At their barbecue."

He shook his head slowly, teasing me, as I turned bright red. "Braawwt," I said.

"I really thought you got it back there when we first drove by, and were just being silly," he laughed.

I started giggling. "Nope. I thought that you thought that - ohmygod. I thought you thought they were having a spanking party at the Elks and I was just like, why would you truly believe that? But I didn't, I didn't..." I was laughing so hard I couldn't catch my breath. When I finally did, I offered my brilliant excuse. "We didn't have bratwursts in New England."

He reached over and took my hand in his. "I'm sure that's a lie. You know you deserve a spanking for this, right? A long, hard spanking."

"Nooooo," I squealed, still giggling. I hadn't laughed like this in a long time. I couldn't believe how ridiculous I'd been, but it was funny and silly and now that I knew the brats at the party were bratwurst sausages, I could be the brat instead. "Pleeeease, you can't spank me for this! We really didn't have bratwurst at our barbecues growing up." I considered adding "We had lobster" but that was really going to get me into trouble for not only being a ditzy brat, but a pretentious one, too.

He returned to his twang. "Well, that's just a damn shame, now, isn't it? For you and yer bottom. I'm going to have to roast it just like those cowboys roasting their bar-b-q meat."

I giggled on and off the whole drive back into town, and by the time we made it to one of the antique malls on our itinerary, I still had tears in my eyes. "I love when I feel like my old silly self," I commented, getting out of the car. He came around and took me in his arms. "I sure love you," he said. Hand in hand, we went inside to see if they might have anything we could use at our own private brat party later on.

A few shots from our stop at the ghost town:

One of the offerings at the shop below,
taken out of context

The General Store at Goldfield Ghost Town, get your
hot sauce and fetishes here

The bordello is a women's history museum, documenting what women's lives were like at the turn of the century in "the old west." It wasn't open yet when we were there, so I didn't get to visit it or find out why there was a cage out front, though I have my ideas. The little chapel at the top of the hill still has Sunday worship services. 

The Found Art of Spanktiquing

Definition of SPANKTIQUE  /'spank-ˈtēk/ > 1 noun spanking implement or item that can be used as a spanking implement belonging to an earlier period, style, or fashion. 2 intransitive verb to shop and/or browse in a traditional antique store for objects that can be used for adult spanking or that incite thoughts of adult spanking and/or eroticism.

Leather straps that would have made ideal spanking
implements if not for the brass horse-themed decorations

On Valentine's Day weekend, we went spanktiquing. "Spanktiques" are similar to what fellow writer and adventuress Curvy Dee has been referring to as "pervertables" for as long as I can remember. I recently wrote about our first experience with this type of shopping in my post Every Ordinary Object but hadn't coined the term yet. Even now, after over a decade of spanktiquing, each trip brings both erotic anticipation and giddy curiousity. What will we find? Will we bring it home? And most importantly, can we spank me with it?


Many of my blog posts are, in essence, love letters first to Mr. W and then to the spanking world at large. I have often spent long hours crafting them. To occupy some of the time in between, I thought it would be fun to start taking pictures and sharing what we find on these spanktique treasure hunts. If it makes us think of sex or spanking, there's a good chance it will do the same for you. All of the photos in this post were taken by me at The Antique Trove in Scottsdale, Arizona on February 13, 2016.

License for Prostitution, applicant Mattie Sue, circa 1893 Prescott, Arizona.
The photo is a vintage pic but probably reproduced from the
nudie cigarette cards and pin-ups from the early 20th century.

License for Prostitution, applicant Midnight Rose, circa 1876 Dodge City, Kansas.

This is just a strange nude. The man is gutting fish. The woman is nude,
showing her bottom, and reading a stack of books. They appear to live
in a very small circus tent. Just one of those great antique mall mystery items.

Signed art on the left by illustrator Dave Stevens, the creator of The Rocketeer,
on a rack of adult pin-up and photography magazines

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.

The Repentant Hat, and Other Retails of Terror

My salvation hat.

There's something to be said for having a hobby that allows every trip out to become the equivalent of a late night trip to the adult shop. The singular difference between the two is that I generally find what I'm looking for when I'm anywhere other than the adult shop. Whole Foods just brought in a new line of wooden cookware. The flat wooden spatula is quite appealing. Ikea has a chair we call "the sex bench," ideal for positions both erotic and disciplinary. In fact, we bought a spanking horse there this weekend. They seemed to think it was for holding up a draft table! Oh, Ikea. They also sold us an implement holder, primarily for canes. They had it labelled as "umbrella stand." Little did they know.

Most fruitful, though, are stores of antiques and collectibles, especially those "antique malls" that feature vendor after vendor of random pervertable items. In the past few weeks, we've amassed a whole new collection. There's the sewing table in the previous post. Last weekend, we found a chair to go with it, an old school chair, from what we can tell, complete with the piece of wood onto which it was bolted surely decades ago. We also had successful trips to Hillsboro (hi, people who visit me from Hillsboro!) and Aurora.

The mounted, and to-be-mounted, chair.

In Hillsboro, we found a fantastic antique store in an old movie theatre. If we'd had the funds, we would have bought the entire building and turned it into a playspace for local fetishists. It featured so many small rooms in an upstairs area, what once were most likely offices but are now perfect individual punishment rooms.... but I digress, as for now, they belong to individual antiques vendors. We found one vendor that surely had the same interests as us, as amidst other ass-centric items--paintings of naked cowgirls, canes, equestrian items--we found a strange riding crop, completely unused on horses but with an interesting curvature indicating other usage.

The coveted crop.

Mr. W had to take a phone-call outside while I made our purchase, so I was alone when the cashier became jealous of the crop. "Where did this come from?" she demanded. "If I'd seen it..." I thought perhaps I should offer her my backside, to make up for having purchased the crop out from under her. I very nearly did so when she asked, "Do you have horses?" I had to tell her no, hoping secretly that this lovely woman who wanted the implement didn't have horses either.

Things were a bit more obvious this past weekend when we bought a well-worn paddle from an antique store in Aurora, Oregon. Their entire small downtown is antique shops, a haven for collectors of antiquities and erotic collectors such as ourselves. In fact, to any Oregon locals, one of the shops (I'm sorry, I cannot recall it's name, but it has a sign about carrying your dog if you bring it inside) has a ridiculous amount of wooden kitchen spoon-paddles. They're not quite spoons, as they have flatter backs, thus making them a bit more useful for spanking purposes. I'm wishing I'd bought them up, but I didn't, so they're there for the taking. Anyhow, we found this light flat paddle in Aurora, and as I purchased it (for embarassment purposes, I always make the purchases), the man behind the counter laughed and said "I'm not gonna ask what that's for. Too much information." I laughed, then blushing slightly, commented, "Well, my smile gave that away." I found myself wishing I had a business card! How I've advanced in just a few weeks. I now want to tell even random strangers what I get up to in my private time.

The obvious paddle.

My favorite find of this weekend, however, is a peculiar hat with a cross on it. The seller said it was an old Salvation Army hat. Mr. W and I had both tried it on, and turned each other on immensely. We both have a thing for hats--something we haven't explored yet on film, as we need the right sets, but come the day, we have a great collection for starters--often in the vein of Russian military, so...ouch. I'm already fantasizing about scenes involving this hat. For example, I imagine it being found out that I haven't done my good deed for the day. Or that I've had an unrepentant sinful thought and I'm made to repent. Either way, despite the hat's inherent absurdity, I feel wonderfully sexy in it. And just, just, a bit silly.