Date: Wed, 28 Aug 1996 00:18:24 -0700
From: laura@goodkitty.com (Laura Werner)
Subject: Hating a spanking

I had an interesting experience during a scene a couple of weeks ago. For those of you who've read my other posts, it was another one of my "firsts". For the first time, I absolutely hated a spanking as it was happening. It's happened one more time since then, and I'm wondering if others feel this way sometimes as well. I'm also just rambling a bit to try to straighten out my thoughts about all of this.

The night of that first scene, the woman who topped me knew that I had been feeling down and that I probably needed to be able to cry. After a few warmup strokes with her hand and maybe a leather paddle, she started spanking me hard with a very thin oak paddle I have. That thing stings. Badly. It really hurt, especially since I hadn't had much warmup.

While I was thrashing around and kicking, a few thoughts were going through my mind. First, I absolutely hated it. I wasn't getting any real enjoyment from the spanking, just a lot of pain. I started to wonder if that was what a real punishment spanking would feel like.

I also started thinking about ending the scene with a safeword, but for some reason I went a bit non-verbal and couldn't bring myself to do it. I think I was afraid of having a huge emotional letdown if the scene "failed" that way. I was also afraid that I would disappoint my top and make her feel like she'd screwed up somehow. Finally, I was mad at and disappointed in myself for not being able to take the paddling. I mean, here I am, a big bad masochist who writes about all these s/m scenes, and I can't even take a lousy paddling.

The combination of that fear, frustration, and disappointment was not fun. In fact, it was so non-fun that I started crying not about the pain or about the rest of my life but about the way the scene was going. But it quickly developed into a general catharasis, and I was letting out all of the awful emotions that I had been struggling with for the past week.

Once I started crying so hard, I noticed that the pain wasn't nearly as bad. I had flipped into a bottom space where I could just be with my emotions and let the pain wash over me. I love it when I get to that place, especially since it doesn't happen all that often. So, paradoxically, a rotten scene was quicky transformed into a wonderful one by just letting myself cry about it.

Ever since, I've wondered a bit about what happened. It was a great spanking, and I have no regrets about doing it. But it was very scary for a while there. Perhaps that's where some of the scene's emotional intensity came from in the first place. Has anyone else had an experience like this, where real fear, disappointment, or frustration have actually had a positive effect on your play?

Last Friday I did a similar scene that ended quite differently. She used the same nasty paddle (why did I ever make that thing? :-) on me, and I landed in the same rotten emotional state fairly quickly. I cried a bit, but I was crying about the scene, not about all the other stuff I wanted to let out. It kind of sucked. The spanking went on for a while as I continued to feel that way, but eventually she asked if I had had enough and then stopped. After that she flogged me with a few of the whips I've been making lately, and that was a lot of fun even when she hit me fairly hard. It helped end the scene on a high note for me

Afterward, she told me that she knew I was hating the spanking but wanted me to hate it. That's fine. I'm a masochist and she's a sadist, and I expect her to want to hurt me. That's supposed to be part of the fun. But it didn't work for me that night, and for some reason I still didn't stop the scene. Maybe that was the right decision; I wouldn't be much of a bottom if I used my safeword to control things all the time.

I've been trying to reconcile these two scenes in my mind ever since. I'm not sure what made the first spanking wonderful and the second one rotten. Perhaps it's just a risk we take when we play on the edge. Any thoughts?

I've talked to the top about both of these scenes, but since she's probably reading this, I want to say that she didn't do anything wrong. As long as I don't safeword, spank at will. Both of the scenes were enjoyable, just in different ways, and I'm looking forward to the next time we get to play.

Laura