Ludwig's Story II: Video Voyeur

As I wrote in the first part of my story, my interest in depictions of spanking and corporal punishment started when I was no older than eight or nine. Needless to say, I had never heard of BDSM or sadomasochism at that age. I only knew that I had strange fantasies which were somehow "grown up" in nature and which none of the other kids seemed to share. I did not talk about them to anyone. In secret, I wondered whether I might be the only person in the world who had this fascination with spanking and CP.

My kinky fantasies had started before I even had an interest in sex (or a clear understanding of how it worked). A few years down the road, however, I did start having an interest in sex. More precisely, I started being interested in naked women. My parents had a handful of issues of Playboy magazine, which were lying around in our living room amidst a pile of various other magazines. Previously, I had not paid them any attention. I had known that they were there, but wasn't interested in them. I would rather look at the other magazines which had articles about computers and science. But at the age of thirteen or fourteen, I suddenly became very curious about the Playboy magazines. I would sneak down to our living room at night to look at them.

(By the way, here is something worth thinking about in the discussion about censoring adult content. The self-appointed moral guardians love trotting out their old canard about "the necessity to protect minors" from the evils of porn. However, as a number of psychological studies shows, there isn't any danger to minors, because 1) in order to find adult content on the internet, you have to actively search for it, and 2) children simply aren't interested in adult content until they reach the age of puberty and start becoming adults themselves. My own development would seem to confirm this.)

The magazines must have made an impression, because several decades later, I still remember the name of one playmate from back then: Celine Huber, who was "Miss October" in 1989 (the magazine must have been a few years old when I looked at it). She had a cute face and a rather spectacular figure, with a petite bottom that seemed destined to inspire spankophile daydreams. The other readers must have shared my enthusiasm: they voted Celine playmate of the year.

(Celine Huber, Miss October 1989, German edition of Playboy)

The late 80s and early 90s were also the time when the German "Privatsender", the privately financed TV channels not owned by the state, would show erotic films late at night during the weekend. Some of them were softcore productions that had been made for TV to begin with, others were hardcore productions with all the explicit bits edited out. Again, I would sneak down on Friday and Saturday nights, when my parents were already in bed, to watch these films. I watched quite a few over these years. Many were utterly awful garbage, like the upight petty bourgeois fantasies of the German School Girl Report series. Some others I found pretty hot, like the French sex films with a Marilyn Monroe-lookalike named Olinka. The stories in the latter were just as silly, mind you, but at least they had good-looking women, and despite the cuts, you could tell that people were having real sex. At school, chatter during recess revealed that other kids were watching these late-night films as well, including most of the boys and some of the girls. One female classmate of mine complained that more was shown of the naked women's bodies than of the naked men. She certainly had a point there.

(Another tidbit worth thinking about: anti-porn crusaders claim that men are "pornified" by watching adult films, turning them into misogynists who see women only as servile sex objects. For what it's worth, I can report that no such transformation took place in my case. Just as I understood that films like Lethal Weapon or Die Hard were not accurate portrayals of the life and work of police officers, I understood that what was shown in soft porn films on late night TV was not an accurate portrayal of how people have sex in real life. I understood that the bodybuilder and the two gals with the supermodel figures having a threesome by the waterfall was simply an erotic fantasy. It did not change how I thought about women. I daresay that if men grow up to become misogynist jerks, there are other factors at play than pornography.)

After I started being interested in "normal" sex, my spanking fantasies subsided somewhat. One reason was that while there was a lot of sex in late night erotic films, scenes of spanking and CP were much more difficult to find. There were a few scenes like that in the school films and pirate films I already knew, but almost all of them were male on male, and none of them were made to be erotic. So I kept wondering whether I might be the only person in the world who would want to see spanking with an erotic "buzz" to it, and preferably with the opposite sex involved. I received the answer to that question one weekend night when I had once again snuck down from my room to watch an adult film on our TV.

What turned out to be a revelation began inauspiciously. As a matter of fact, the film looked like utter crap. It was an older production from the 1970s. The story was about a boarding house run by a stern and puritanical widow. When a young and attractive pensioner from Norway moves in and does gymnastics in the nude, the other guests one by one get naughty and start having sex. It was daft even by porn standards. What was worse, the film's cast, except for one actress, was unattractive, and the sex scenes were lame. I had half a mind to stop watching and go back to bed, but I held out hope that there would be at least one good sex scene with the one attractive actress.

Towards the end of the film, the widow who owns the boarding house has thrown out all her guests. Depressed, she sits by the fireplace and starts looking through a large pile of erotic photographs and magazines left behind by one of the guests, first with revulsion, then with mounting curiosity and excitement. This leads to a weird (and clumsily edited) fantasy / dream sequence mixing flashbacks from the film so far with snippets from other 1970s erotic films. It was this fantasy sequence where things suddenly became very interesting, because many of these little snippets showed men and women whipping each other.

I was dumbfounded. Then ecstatic. The segment that made the biggest impression on me showed a man, who appeared to be a monk judging by his robes, lifting a woman's dress and thrashing her bottom with a short whip. I thought it was probably the sexiest thing I had ever seen. As is often the case with such Eureka experiences, it seemed as if someone had read my thoughts - rather, my erotic fantasies - and put this image I had always dreamed about right there in front of me, into the film. But the fact was, it wasn't me who had created that scene in the film, it was someone else. In this instant, it was clear that I was not the only person in the world who found depictions of spanking and CP erotic. Whoever had filmed this scene had the same fascination.

In the mainstream films, the whippings of sailors and other such CP scenes were not made to be erotic. But this scene clearly was. The young woman was whipped on her naked bottom. The monk was obviously enjoying it, grinning with sadistic glee. It was plain as day that this was intended to be an arousing scene, conceived by someone and produced for an audience who got excited by depictions of spanking and CP. There were other brief snippets of whipping in the sequence, including some F/M, but none were as good in my mind as the monk and the sexy lass.

Fortunately, the film was shown again the next night, at an even later time. I nicked a blank video cassette from my parents (they had so many that they did not notice) and recorded the scene so I could rewatch it whenever I wanted. One or two house moves later, I lost the cassette. I've been trying for years to find that whipping scene again. It is brief and very average, nothing special at all really, but it was the first glimpse of erotic corporal punishment I ever saw and held tremendous nostalgic value for me. But I did not remember the title of the film and it was such an old, obscure production that I searched in vain for a long time. Only recently did I finally find out which film it was (I browsed through old German TV schedules which are available online): La pension du libre amour, France, 1974. It was shown on German TV under the title Pension zur freien Liebe.

 (Whipping scene from La pension du libre amour)

 
In the following years, I found a few more decent spanking and CP scenes on television. I recorded them on my precious video cassette, the seed of a collection. I learned from passing mentions in magazine articles and books that some people had what was called an inclination for sadomasochism and practiced what was called BDSM. It was all rather simplified and superficial and left open a lot of questions. Was sadomasochism a sickness or not? Did it apply to me? I recognised that my faible for spanking scenes in films had something to do with this strange inclination, but I wasn't sure if I would like spanking in practice or if I ever wanted to try it out. So I probably wasn't a "true" sadomasochist. In any case, I was a virgin at the time and hadn't even experienced "normal" sex. The possibility of ever trying out BDSM seemed so remote and improbable that I never seriously thought about it.

By the turn of the millennium, I was an adult and online. The internet made finding kinky stuff so much easier. Not only were there websites listing CP scenes from mainstream films, like the fabulous Whipping Scenes in Movies Database. There was also a huge amount of porn showing real spankings, strappings, canings and so on. I was astonished by how many such videos existed and how widespread they were. Even porn paysites that featured mostly mainstream content often had some CP clips as well. Apparently, the number of people who were into this was much bigger than I had imagined.

This was the time when a video file of 10 MB was considered large and took a significant amount of time to download. Consequently, most of the CP I saw consisted of clips 10 to 30 seconds long. I found out later that many of my favourite snippets from that time were from California Star's English Discipline Series. Over the next couple of years, my internet connection gradually became faster and the files bigger. I discovered the Beach Girl Spankings videos by Raven Hill, which were interesting because of their "reality TV" vibe. Then, another major Eureka moment as I stumbled upon my first Rigid East film. The Czechs, who later became Lupus Pictures, made exactly the kind of CP video I had long fantasized about: very severe canings, great-looking girls, good stories, professional production. I wrote about the impact their videos had on me in my post The Company of Wolves.

While my video collection grew to be quite vast and I saw more and more CP action on the screen, I still had no practical experience of any of this. I became increasingly aware of a feeling of discrepancy, for lack of a better word. For a very long time, I had been perfectly happy with just being a video voyeur. But now I began to seriously consider trying out spanking and CP for myself, if only to get an insight into how it felt like for the spankees in the videos I so enjoyed. But how to go about it? I did not know anybody in the BDSM scene. Online, I had chatted with a couple of fellow video collectors who were just as clueless about real kink as me. That was the full extent of my acquaintances.

In the next instalment, I will tell you how I progressed from gray theory to the green of life's golden tree (to abuse Goethe's phrase). In the meatime, if you like, you can share your own story in the comments section. Did you also wonder if you were perhaps the only person in the world who was fascinated by corporal punishment? How did you find out that there were others? What was the first great, erotic CP scene you saw in a film? How did your kink develop while you were a young adult?