Sunday night musings

Having complained that none of the stories out there do it for me (well, not quite none) I've now had a go at writing one myself - see below. I make no great claims for it - bits of it I like, but it's too long and a bit rambling, and it's also pretty transparently a male fantasy - I can't imagine that girls who read it will find the female characterisation particularly convincing. (I suspect men will be less bothered about this particular weakness.) It's just somewhere to start, and if I go on and write some more it will serve as an interesting benchmark for comparison. Please do have a read if you're so inclined.

This Sunday evening finds me in a reflective sort of mood - the sort of mood in which, when I didn't have a blog, I would have thought to myself, 'if I had a blog, this is the sort of time I might write it'. So now I feel I ought to test the theory.

One of the great things the Internet has done for us (I mean that in the widest possible sense of 'us') is provide a resoundingly negative answer to the question: 'is it just me?' - for millions of people with all sorts of interests, weirdnesses, predilections. All those people have been able to arrange themselves into online 'communities', disspelling their fears that it might be 'just them'.

But what do we mean by that? The word 'community' gets bandied about a lot these days - it has a reassuringly tight-knit sound about it that is attractive to spankophiles*, politicians, companies and anyone wanting to give the impression that a disparate collection of people with distinct interests can be viewed as a cohesive group. What do we imply by viewing ourselves as a community? Probably that we see ourselves as having certain characteristics or interests in common with the other members. What is the advantage of that? Mainly that those characteristics/interests which might be viewed as deviant or negative in another community can become normal, valid and positive.

Like all groups, the online spanking community, insofar as it can be considered as a united corpus, has developed its own norms of valid behaviour, valid opinions, positive attributes etc. Obviously this is not something so simplistic as a reversal of 'vanilla' norms, whereby people with a spanking fetish are considered normal and people without one deviant. After all, it isn't the lack of a spanking fetish in other people that we find objectionable; it is their narrow-mindedness towards ours. So we tend to define permissiveness and open-mindedness as positive. That's just an example, and one that largely makes sense.

The reason I'm going on about this is that I think that we may have come full circle, with people surfing the spanking web, looking at what is on offer, at the comments left on blogs and the messages posted in public forums, and thinking - 'is it just me?' This is a natural and indeed inevitable situation, but I think it's worth pointing out. So what I want to do here is mention a few personal inclinations that seem to get a bit less airtime than others - if you sympathise, please shout.

1. Posting online involves a fairly significant compromise of privacy - even when not revealing personal details - that I don't find comes easily. Maybe that's being a buttoned-up Brit for you! It always seems to me - irrationally I know - that everyone else posts a comment on a website, switches off their computer, goes off to a dinner party where they make frivolous small talk about their current play partners and recent spanking party experiences, then gets up the next morning and goes off to a Kink Pride march, probably wearing some kind of cute little 'rosy cheeks' lapel badge. I have never hankered after a world in which case I could share my interest with all my 'real-life' friends, any more than I tell them about any of my other sexual interests and activities, and I think there's something nice about keeping certain things private. Paradoxically sharing it with the whole world on a blog is less of a problem than telling my closest friends.

2. As I've mentioned in my first post and in the footnote below, my interests do not by any means stretch to all aspects of BDSM activity. When I filled out a profile on Informed Consent I didn't even know what half of the checkboxes meant. I know this applies to loads of other people too. The only reason I mention it is that I think one of the dangers of thinking of ourselves as the 'spanking community' or even the 'BDSM community' is that we focus attention on our similarities, at the expense of our differences. This is a danger whenever one talks about the '____ community', whatever that blank might represent. When I look at that IC profile it seems awfully bare. But I'm just not that interested in leather, ropes, cutting, electricity (!) or feet.

Threesomes, on the other hand, are another matter.

3. Thrilled as I am that I can switch on my laptop and instantly watch videos, see pictures and read stories depicting girls being spanked in 19,372 different ways, it sure isn't a patch on the real thing. Now that I'm sure is a view that almost everyone would concur with, but what beats me is how many websites there are maintained by people whose life contains such a healthy amount of spanking! If I were in a relationship with a girl who liked being spanked I wouldn't be doing this; hell, I'd hardly have time to check my email, I'd be so busy. For those with a commercial/professional interest in spanking, it's another thing entirely, but otherwise - well, I'm very glad they do and I've nothing but admiration for their dedication. I'm just confessing right now that if there were a girl across my lap, I don't think there'd be room for a computer as well.

4. The idea of meeting other spankophiles is great in principle, but any way of doing so that involves a real-life event fills me with horror. It's not even a matter of anonymity, so much, and it's certainly not about social embarrassment. I've never been quite sure what it's about, though actually writing this post I being to have an inkling that it's actually to do with this whole issue that I'm discussing ('there's an issue he's discussing?', I hear you cry, 'I thought this was just an incoherent ramble'), that of the nebulous and many-headed monster that is the Community. I've never been to a 'munch', but my guess is that at your typical London munch, everyone's extraordinarily friendly and welcoming, the atmosphere is totally unthreatening and it's basically just a way of meeting people that happen to have one particular thing in common. All I can say is - if you don't understand how dreadful that sounds, I'm not sure I can explain, but I'm sure somebody must.

Anyway, I think that's enough wittering and provocation for now, except to say how great it is to see that Pandora has started posting again - I've been lurking there for a long time and it's principally her blog that inspired me start writing one of my own. Whether she's to be thanked or blamed for that, it may be too early to say.


*In reading this and all posts, please note that I am not particularly interested in BDSM in general, only in those aspects of it that relate to my interest in spanking. There is obviously a certain amount of overlap but when I talk about the online spanking community I have in mind websites and users whose interests relate to mine, and if my focus seems narrow, please be aware that I am not trying to speak for every kinky websurfer out there!