Bramblewine

I'm willing to accept bruising as a possible side effect, but it's a side effect, not the desired effect. If I can get the sensation I really want without being bruised, just well reddened, then I'm satisfied.

Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water, Jack fell down and broke his crown, And Jill came tumbling after. Let’s parse apart this story here. Water flows downhill, not up. The place to fetch it, if the well was dug where it’s naturally suitable for a well to be, would be down the hill. So what were Jack and Jill really going up the hill for? “To fetch a pail of water,” the lads at the tavern said, with ribald laughter and winks and nudges. “She’ll break his crown, all right!” the washerwomen at the stream said with the same laughter and winks. You see, “to break one’s crown” was once slang for losing one’s virginity. And “fetch a pail of water,” well, the context should tell you what that meant. Jack and Jill were not, contrary to what the storybook illustrations would have you believe, children. They were not brother and sister. They were not related at all. Good thing. This is not an incest story. No, Jack was a young man of the village, who’d gotten concerned that he was missing out, seeing as how he’d nearly reached the age of one-and-twenty and was still a virgin. Jill was the very lass to help him out with that problem. She was scarcely any older than he was, but she had a big heart and, while she preferred not to be tied down to any man, she loved all the activities a woman could get up to with a man, if he was willing. So when Jack fell down and broke his crown, no harm was done him. And when Jill came tumbling after, she showed him what he’d been missing and then some. It surpassed his wildest dreams. Then up Jack got and home did trot, As fast as he could caper, To Old Dame Dob, who patched his knob With vinegar and brown paper. Some say this part of the rhyme was invented to sanitize the tale. Vinegar and brown paper was the icepack of old. Brown paper was a thick kind of paper that did not fall apart when soaked, and vinegar has antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties. Put that on a bruise, and it would help the healing. Often done for children who’d bumped their heads. But here’s what really happened: Jack got concerned, once the deed was done, that Jill might have given him something, seeing as how she’d gotten around. There was no HIV back then, but there were plenty of other nasty diseases that spread the same way, and since cheap, comfortable condoms had yet to be invented, post exposure prophylaxis was the way to go. Old Dame Dob was the village midwife. A midwife’s job was not just birthing babies, but taking care of everyone’s health, reproductive and otherwise. She knew what to do for a man who’d just potentially been exposed. Vinegar’s antiseptic properties could theoretically work against syphilis or gonorrhea or other great scourges (but don’t use it instead of medical attention, please!) and if that was what you had, that was what you tried. (Jill was not as concerned, because she knew how to protect herself: she inserted half a lemon before the act. That’s actually not uncomfortable, and modern research suggests that it may very well be effective against both STDs and sperm.) And no, in case you haven’t already figured it out, it was not the head on Jack’s shoulders that needed patching. When Jill came in, how she did grin To see Jack’s paper plaster, Mother whipped her across her knee For causing Jack’s disaster. Jill did think it was hilarious when she saw what Jack had done to himself. But what’s this nonsense about Mother? These were not children. No, Jack spanked her and whipped her himself. Across his knee, for starters. Then in every position every which way from Sunday and with every implement he could think to try. He scolded her for laughing at his disaster and for making it necessary to see the midwife in the first place, which made Jill laugh all the more, between her yells of pain and ecstasy… and suggest what implement her naughty bottom deserved next. But soon Jack had to save his breath and his strength for attending to Jill and her naughty bottom, which was turning nicely red and striped. And Jill was experiencing such ecstasy as never before. She came so many times that Jack had to pause just to let her breathe. Now Jack did laugh and Jill did cry But her tears did soon abate, Then Jill did say that they should play At see-saw on the gate. No one had ever spanked Jill to tears before. Even now, she only cried a little, at the end, and that only because the last flurry of whacks came so fast. But when they were both spent from that, Jack felt a stirring in his groin again, and figured that since he’d applied the vinegar so recently, it would probably keep him safe enough for another go. And Jill’s orgasms had only been the beginning. Feeling the soreness and stripes on her bottom, pressed against Jack, excited her all the more. I will leave it to your imagination, dear reader, what position “see-saw on the gate” was. You may be more creative than I.

For me, it depends on how you define "accept it." I had spanking fantasies at least as far back as age 4 or 5. I don't remember being that uncomfortable with them, they were just there. But I wasn't as obsessive as some young spankos are, either. Constantly look up spank in the dictionary? Yes, I did that. Pore over kids' books with spanking, thrashing, etc. in them? Check. When I opened my copy of Mother Goose, it was almost always to the full page illustration of the old woman in the shoe, who was birching one of the kids while the rest were either crying or waiting their turn. But I didn't go in for spanking games that I remember, or asking other kids about their spankings (although in my generation, being spanked at least once in a while was common) or anything like that. When I was around 20, it finally dawned on me that my spanking fantasies were sexual fantasies. That was a big aha. Up to that point, I hadn't thought I had sexual fantasies. I had crushes, I had strong feelings toward certain guys, and I could feel that without thinking about spanking at all, but I never fantasized much about sex itself. Even when I started having it, in my early twenties, it was something I could get into enthusiastically when it was happening--and none of those experiences involved spanking--but when I was alone, my fantasies were about spanking. But for the next decade at least, I thought spanking was something I wanted in fantasy but not in reality. I was probably thirty or so when it occurred to me that I might actually want real spanking. But it took several years after that to work up the courage to ask my then-partner for it. So my acceptance happened in phases, not all at once.

Someone up thread suggested that female led works out better. No idea if that's true, of course. But that suggestion was what I was responding to. The concern about power also applies to vanilla relationships. Perhaps even more so, in some cases, because the more conventional a couple is, sexually or otherwise, the more they can get away with just assuming and not negotiating. Vanilla couples often don't negotiate much if any of what they'll do sexually, beyond initially agreeing to sleep together. Non-vanilla couples know that negotiation is needed right off the bat. But if you put DD into the mix, then power issues are unavoidable. If done well, I could see DD being a way to consciously handle the power issues, but is it always done so consciously? I don't know what the exact issues are that you're seeing in the submissives in those relationships, but I'm wondering if perhaps they're people who are prone to giving their power away, and they've taken it to the extreme in a DD relationship? That would also mean that their dominant partners are willing to take that power over them, and that too could go to the extreme with DD.

There's a member on here, RandE, who's in one. He hasn't posted in this thread, though. While I can't speak from personal experience, most of the DD marriages I've heard of (online--I don't know anyone irl who's in one, at least not that I'm aware of) consist of a dominant husband and submissive wife. Seems to me that's the extreme version of traditional patriarchal marriage. I suspect that's a big contributing factor in all of those problems. If female led (or same gender) DD marriages actually do work out better, maybe that's because they're turning patriarchy on its head. There's also the power factor. Even in vanilla relationships, a big problem some people have is a tendency to give their own innate personal power away to their partner, disempowering themselves. D/s could simply be playing with that dynamic without really making it too serious--kind of, to my mind, like playing with fear and sense of danger by watching a horror movie or riding a roller coaster instead of putting yourself in real danger--but it seems to me that it could also present a very real and all the more extreme temptation for one person to give their power away and the other to take it and keep it.

I'm enjoying your apprentice witch story! It's rather similar to a concept I came up with for some spanking stories of my own, which I'm working on. Right down to the forbidden book, only my take on it was different. (Reading the book wasn't forbidden, but trying the spell in it was, and of course the apprentice had to try.) Maybe we should compete to see how many ways we can come up with for a magical apprentice to get in trouble....

The spanker in that picture is Alex Reynolds, who writes the Alex in Spankingland blog. She wrote a post about that scene, somewhere. The spankee is genderqueer. As I recall, Alex said her costar was female bodied but male identified in real life, but was playing a girl character in that scene.

But that wouldn't explain the spanker having no pants on.

I was actually asking how you're defining the difference between play and just wanting a good spanking. Your wording implied that you see those as two different things. But you just answered my question behind the question, which probably is a little off topic for this thread: I have been wondering, since I see so many ERs on here who seem to be about discipline, how hard it might be, when I seriously start looking, to find an ER who's happy with an ee who isn't into discipline and isn't submissive.

Fortunately, this was a long ago and far away land where cell phone towers were never built and satellites were never launched. The cell phones didn't work anyway. They were just symbols of a potential relationship, which might be magicked into existence through intention. It was more convenient to have a modern year round symbol than have to wait til the next summer solstice to see your ER-to-be in the scrying bowl, which was the old fashioned way.

I wish all spankers saw it the way you do! I wouldn't feel safe with anyone who acted like they were my disciplinarian when we hadn't established them as such, and establishing them as such would mean I had outright asked them to discipline me, they had agreed, and we had CLEARLY spelled out, together, the circumstances and ways they would and wouldn't do it. But I, and this seems to be unusual for spankees, don't really want a disciplinarian. I know full well that I wouldn't respond to spanking as real discipline. I suspect that even trying to do it that way would just make me feel disempowered. With a friend, if I told them about some mistake I'd made, I'd want a non-judgmental response, NOT a strict one. If I were telling anyone about a mistake, I wouldn't be looking for punishment, I would be trying to sort out what was really going on for me when it happened and come to some peace, and sort out how to make amends if my mistake had hurt anyone. A strict, punitive response wouldn't help, it would just make the matter worse. Well said. I don't have the spanking world experience to back it up, but I see a parallel in the workplace. The best bosses I've ever had were strict but kind. They'd insist on me doing my best, no excuses, but they were also understanding, and encouraging, if I made mistakes or struggled with something. In education, good teachers work the same way. For anyone with authority over others, that's the way to handle it. Being an asshole is abuse of authority, and of the person(s) you're in authority over.

So you don't see "just getting a good spanking" as play? What would be the difference? I think of myself as just wanting to play, but really, I'm into getting a good spanking. Not for real punishment, but I'm open to funishment for playful "naughtiness" as the rationale. Or setting up a game where there are non-serious rules I could break on purpose and "earn" a spanking. Or just both me and the spanker acknowledging that I want a good spanking and they want to give one. What I don't want is to feel I'm being dominated and controlled for real. Aside from the spanker taking just enough physical control to spank me. Being dominated outside of that is much too disempowering.

He must be an exhibitionist himself, if he's willing to be seen naked below the belt!

I thought of Persepolis immediately when I was reading your novel. Both of them are growing up stories dealing with sensitive subjects. Your fairy friend scenes reminded me of the childhood conversations with God in Persepolis. There are LOTS of parallels. Yes, it is on par with those masterpieces!

For you, what's the difference between sexual and non-sexual spanking? Intent? Your own feelings? Who you're being spanked by (ie gender)? Something else?