Combien de cigarettes, Mademoiselle?

I was planning on telling the backstory in relatively chronological order up to now- I thought it would just be two or three more posts, and it'll probably be more like five. So many spankings are going by, and where's the fun in linear timelines, anyway?*

When M. and I agreed to start using spanking for discipline instead of just play- which was only about two weeks ago!- he had me make a list of things I was going to be spanked for. We wanted to ease into this, so right now I have only two rules, but we usually look at The List every two days or so and add things that I need to do within a certain timeline, like cleaning the kitchen or calling my doctor.

I'm categorically awful about things like this. I work best under absolute deadlines, which means that I'm very good at school and my job (I'm editor in chief of a literary journal). I often think about papers for weeks and then write them at the last minute, but they always get done, and I'm a straight-A student. I pay rent and my credit card bills on time. But smaller, day-to-day tasks have been procrastinated for days or weeks, since there wasn't any real consequence if I didn't do them.

The two things that are always on the List are waking up on time- over break, that's 9 on weekdays and 10 and weekends- and monitoring my smoking. I've smoked almost a pack a day for almost five years, and have decided to get serious about quitting. Aside from the obvious and important matter of my health, I'm a singer, and cigarettes don't exactly do wonders for my voice. In the past, I've tried to quit cold turkey, and it's been disastrous- I went a week last summer, but was so awful and miserable to be around that M. actually told me to go smoke because he just couldn't deal with the way I was acting. That was pretty serious- he hates smoking and has never done it, and he's usually incredibly patient and supportive.

This time, I planned to quit months in advance. My quit date was supposed to be 1 January, but I'm going to be using the patch, and my health insurance will pay for it if I get a prescription. I couldn't get a doctor's appointment until 9 January, so my quit date is now the 10th. In the meantime, I've been trying really hard to eat healthy- to assuage fears about gaining weight- and I've been gradually reducing my smoking since 1 December. First I went down to fifteen cigarettes a day, then ten, which is half of what I used to smoke. Starting yesterday, I was supposed to be cutting down by one per day, so that when I actually go on the patch I won't be coming off of a really heavy habit.

I've been doing really well, overall. I've been spanked twice for smoking eleven cigarettes instead of ten, but that's still a significant cutdown, and the punishments haven't been very severe- the first time I got a hand-spanking and the second time I got the hairbrush over my panties.

I could easily have stayed within my limit yesterday if not for the influence of alchohol. Thursday is my band practice night, and we always share a bottle of wine and some beer. My mandolin player smokes too, and excessive smoking is difficult to resist in the atmosphere of slightly tipsy music-playing with friends. So while M. was tuning his banjo, we went out to the porch and I smoked my ninth cigarette. And then we were having some animated conversation, and I just decided that I didn't care, I was going to smoke my tenth. Stupidly, after he left, I went out and smoked another one before bed. 'I'm going to be spanked either way,' I thought, 'so what's the difference?'

I confess to feeling somewhat defiant about the whole thing. M. is strict, but we're easing into things and so far the punishment spankings have not been very hard. They've certainly been enough to make me squirm and whimper, but I have a high tolerance for pain and I guess I need something more serious, something to really make me regret my behavior. The desire to follow the rules, especially ones about smoking, helps. But obedience doesn't really feel good unless disobedience feels painful...

I took out my contacts and washed my face and put on pajama pants and went upstairs to our room. M. was on the computer, and I curled up in bed with The Economist and waited for the usual question at the end of the day. "Combien de cigarettes aujourd h'ui?" (It's another post for another time, but we speak French at home a lot, especially regarding disciplinary matters.) Anyway, the question didn't come. I think M. had commented when I went out for my ninth cigarette and didn't know I had gone out again, so he thought I was within my limits. I waited a while and then decided I'd better confess, which I did in mumbled tones with my face behind the covers.

"I see," M. said in a tone I haven't heard much of yet, one that still makes me want to hide under the bed. "Well, I'm finishing something up right now, but as soon as I'm done you're going to be punished." Great- I now had to wait, with that little knot at the bottom of my stomach, part guilt, part fear, part anticipation. That knot I've spent my whole life craving.

About twenty minutes later, M. pulled out the drawer under our bed, pulled out the razor strop, and draped it over the footboard. The knot in my stomach twisted as he pulled the covers off of me. "I'm going downstairs to brush my teeth. I want you to stand up and pull down your pants and think about what you're being punished for." He waited for me to obey and left the room, and I stood there feeling utterly stupid. 'What was I thinking?' It felt like forever before he came back up the stairs, pausing in the doorway to look at me, to watch me blush. He came over to me and had me kneel on the bed, sliding my new white cotton panties down to my knees.

He spanked me hard with his hand for a few minutes, and then he picked up the strap. The first few strokes were gentle- he hadn't wielded it in months- but gradually they became harder, landing squarely and heavily on my sit spot again and again, as I whimpered and tried my best not to squirm. The whole thing only lasted a few minutes. "Ok, you can get into bed now," he said, easing me onto my stomach and sliding my panties down. He kissed me on the top of the head and crawled into bed beside me.

We talked a little bit about what I needed to do to make sure I didn't go past my limits, and I confessed that I was scared about quitting, didn't know how I would be able to do it. M. was snuggling me and reassuring me very sweetly, and I mumbled into his shoulder, "You might have to be a little stricter."

"It hasn't really sunken in tonight, has it?" I sighed. "No, sir." "Well, I can take care of that right now." He didn't make me get up, just rolled me back on my stomach and lifted the covers to spank me with his hand. I swear, sometimes his hand hurts more than any strap or any paddle. He spanked me for a long time, pinning my legs down when I kicked, until my bottom was as red as it's been in months and months. "Brave girl. Eight cigarettes tomorrow, ok?" Spank. "Yes, sir."

I'm sitting on a pillow today, and appreciating the fact that it's very, very cold here- not much motivation to go out to the porch!

Early Days

I'm looking forward to making more specific posts about day-to-day life (and day-to-day spankings!), but first I want to give a little background.

I'm an undergraduate right now, which means I grew up at the time when most people were getting internet access in their homes. I wasn't spanked as a child, but I was obsessed with the concept from very early childhood. I used to look the word up in the dictionary again and again, a practice that appears to be common among spanking people. Anyway, by the time I was 9 or so, I could type the word into AOL or yahoo or whatever inferior search engine we had access to. Even with parental controls (oh, AOL...), I came across a lot of pages that, while not openly sex or fetish pages, were clearly authored by equally obsessed individuals. A lot of them were evangelical Christian sites written by parents or parenting advocates. In retrospect, I find these really disturbing, because the language and detail are so obviously fetishistic, but the subject is children rather than consenting adults. These are the people crusading against access to pornography or even sexual information, and simultaneously denying that anything sexual is going on when they spank their kids. Ugh.

As I reached early adolescence, I developed into an extremely sexually self-aware little person. I wonder how much of this is just inherent in my personality- I was always intellectually precocious. My pre-school report card reads, "This is an adult in a child's body." I read constantly from the time I was four, and when I started thinking about sex, I went straight to the library. I identified as a "pro-sex feminist," a term I thought I'd invented, by the time I was twelve. I read Nancy Friday's collections of fantasies, most everything by Susie Bright, and Leora Tanenbaums, "Slut; Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation"before my friends knew what a reputation was. I read about the Riot Grrl movement ten years too late, but that didn't stop me from listening to Bikini Kill records and writing zines with articles like, "What Every Girl Should Know About Vibrators," and "The Sexual Double Standard." I handed these out in middle school. When the administrator found one and called my mother, she was understandably horrified; I gave her a list of book titles to read and told her I had the right to assert my own sexuality in a healthy way. Poor Mom!

Meanwhile, I had subverted the parental controls and was reading spanking stories, BDSM 101 sites, and message boards galore. I started writing spanking stories in my notebook, and I masturbated copiously thinking about nothing but disciplinary scenarios. I did all this in a kind of bubble, unable to say or even think the word "fetish," but I did it relatively guilt-free. What I had gained from all that internet access was the knowledge that I wasn't alone- that there were lots and lots of people out there who thought and felt and craved what I did. At twelve, that was enough.

All of this raises questions that I really don't have answers to about kids and their access to "pornography." Do I want underage kids reading my blog? No, not really. Am I about to go write "18+" at the top of my page to protect myself? Yes. (Thanks to Amber for inadvertently reminding me to do this.) It's kind of like the alchohol age. Most people agree that it's stupid to allow people to vote and smoke and buy guns at 18, but not to drink for another three years. People under 21 find this especially infuriating. But once you're actually old enough to drink in a bar, you don't give two hoots whether younger people can get in; in fact, you don't really want them to.

It's easy to apply that rationale to teenagers- in my heart, I genuinely don't care if sixteen and seventeen year olds are reading explicit material, especially given that the age of consent is sixteen in many areas. But what about ten year olds? That immediately raises my protect-the-children hackles. But I still say I was lucky to grow up without the guilt and the shame that most fetishists experience, knowing that I wasn't alone, knowing that at some point in my life I would actually be able to do the things I thought about. I knew about safewords. I understood consent. I had a feel for my own preferences- I knew what turned me on, which meant that later I knew how to say "yes" and how to say "no." The internet is probably not the ideal place to learn all of this- the fact that the explicit stuff I saw didn't warp my little mind doesn't mean that less precocious kids wouldn't be negatively affected. But how are they supposed to get important information about their sexuality otherwise?

Writing 'Profusity'

So, after thirteen years of lurking on spanking sites, I'm finally debuting a kinky blog of my own. I sometimes feel like kind of an anomaly among spanking fetishists, especially given that I have other BDSM interests as well, though they are less prominent. I don't attend munches or play parties. I much prefer pubs to clubs. I've been known to write the odd spanking story, but I don't publish them. Though I've been fascinated by internet spanking discussions, I've never joined in or emailed the authors. A few of my friends are kinky- most are not.

Honestly, I attribute this to sheer laziness more than anything else, and a strange shyness at the computer. I seem to be the opposite of your average person- in general, I'm way more comfortable speaking my mind in person than trying to find the words on a blog. I'm an articulate, quick speaker and a usually-articulate, slow writer. Papers for school inevitably involve length extensions and recieve As, but I work on them for literally 50 or 60 hours before they're done. Likewise, on my other, non-kinky, general blog, I've been known to open up an entry, type a few words, sit and stare, and then scrap the whole thing. It might just be my enormous perfectionist streak- it's so much easier to catch errors in print than in speech, and I always want the words I write to convey exactly what I mean.

Lately, though, I've been struck by a desire for community when reading spanking blogs. I have things to say, people to respond to, and experiences of my own that I want to catologue. Writing on paper has always been cathartic for me, but now I want the feedback to that catharsis. As I'll get on to explaining in a later post, the experiences I read about and craved for years are now part of my own life, and maybe there's a sense of affinity with other writers that wasn't quite the same before.

I know the anonymity thing is going to be a little bit of a struggle for me. My spanking fetish, my DD relationship, these things are not divorced from who I am- they are directly tied in to my personality, my lifestyle, my fears and joys, and my politics. As I recently explained to a very vanilla friend, it's an orientation, not just a preference. So of course, I want to be able to give general and specific information about my life. I'm not exactly what you'd call "closeted." Almost all of my friends understand the nature of my relationship. I will happily talk about BDSM to strangers at parties. But the point of all of this is that I get to choose when I talk about it and how much information I give. By keeping things at least somewhat anonymous- not listing my real name or what school I go to- the audience of this blog will be somewhat self-selecting. People will find it by looking up spanking, not by looking up me.

There are only a few people I'm actually "hiding" from- like deans of law schools I might apply to- and hopefully they won't stumble on to this blog. But there are lots of people I just don't want to talk about spanking with, the same folks I like just fine but wouldn't talk to about my period or my family history. Intimacy levels, you know. And finally, there are people with whom I have very in-depth conversations about other things, who could judge me or not without any effect, and I still just wouldn't really want to explain. There are lots of resources out there to answer questions like, "How can you be a feminist and be spanked by your male partner?" "Why do people do this?" and "Am I normal?"
I'm just not one of them. That isn't to say I won't ever re-consider these questions for myself, or that I won't happily point people who ask them in the direction of good resources. I just don't want to have to answer them three times a day from people who sit in class with me or read my other blogs.

Anyway, my guess about anonymity is that I'll handle it on a case-by-case point. My main goal is to write what I think and feel and experience, and hopefully connect with others along the way. Certain details will always stay hidden, but if I were really obsessed with remaining totally anonymous, I wouldn't be posting on the internet!