Kaelah's Corner (Dec 2014): Coming Home

(...doesn't always stay in Vegas.)

This is the third part of my series about my journey as a kinky blogger during the past years. You can read the first two parts here and here.

I think my third year of blogging maybe was the best one. It was the time I felt more and more comfortable with exploring my kink and with meeting other kinksters as well. I also think that by this time my exhibitionistic streak had fully set in and I loved posting spanking pictures and videos.

In September 2011 Ludwig and I went to Vegas to take part in the Shadow Lane party. It was wonderful to meet many fellow bloggers with whom I had chatted online before but whom I had never met in person. This experience among others made me feel like I finally really belonged to the kinky online community and had found real friends.

(Psychic Interrogation.)

Another important landmark was the launch of Dreams of Spanking in December 2011. Ludwig and I had made three clips for Pandora's site and it was very exciting to see them posted one after another. I had finally published videos for a professional spanking producer! The clip I am most proud of called Final Test can now be watched for free on Pandora's site Darker Dreams. I also shot a scene for the SM Circus, which was lots of fun as well!

My third year of blogging also was a very active one. I still wrote some philosophical ramblings, for instance about the habit of judging people who are into severe spankings and about rude and respectful tops. I also discussed my personal kink, for instance about sexual references in spanking porn and what F/F play and M/M scenes meant to me. I got many comments on these posts which made the writing all the more exciting and worthwhile.

 

(At the Circus (Part 3): Naughty Petgirl Attack.)  

Of course I also posted about private exploits and shared kinky pictures. And two free videos were published, too, a LOL Day clip called 48 and Ludwig's football bet whipping and caning by Leia Ann Woods and myself. My third blogiversary post in August 2012 again gave our readers the chance to vote for a little free clip. It got 40 comments.

I think there are two posts which reflect very accurately how I felt at that time. The first one is called Point of No Return and discusses in how far exploring my kink was a life altering experience. The second one is about bonding in the kinky online community.

In my last post in 2011 A Past and Future Secret, I wrote: "I have met the man of my life through this blog and his clip-making activities. Writing, getting a positive feedback and kicking of discussions with my posts is something I enjoy tremendously. Taking creative erotic pictures and publishing them makes me feel womanly, sexy and happy. Publishing a clip gives me a wonderful thrill. And sometimes the greatest thing of all happens: I get a nice comment or email from someone who tells me that our writing has inspired him or her."

(Kinky Hotel: The Bedroom.)

Looking back at that time and the old posts makes me smile. As the more avid readers of our blog know, this year was a hard one for Ludwig and me. I've been struggling with a few things which had a very negative influence on my sexuality. Some people already speculated whether I might lose my kink altogether. I am sure that this won't happen, though. It was my sex thrive in general which was very low, not the kink in particular.

The last few weeks showed some improvement, though, and I can now actually relate to how thrilling the thought of kink and blogging felt some time ago. I might tell you a bit more about that in the upcoming year.

(A Badly Behaved Young Lady.)

 For now, I wish you a wonderful New Year's eve. May 2015 be a great year for all of you, bringing you happiness and contentment. I am looking forward to a fun evening with Ludwig and friends!

World Cup Bets Part 2: Ludwig

Back in June, our reader Simon, Kaelah and I made bets on the Football World Cup, predictably resulting in sore bottoms for everyone involved. Simon already wrote a guest post about his part of the betting results, a long and hard 57 stroke caning (rounded up to 60 strokes by Simon's mistress). I didn't get it quite so bad. I had volunteered to take one stroke with our nasty rubber flogger for each point I did not get in the bet. A maximum of 60 points was achievable and I got 17 points with my correct predictions, so I ended up with 43 strokes. Still a respectable thrashing. [Comment from Kaelah: Ludwig is quite used to ending up with a sore bottom after a bet, so 43 strokes with our nasty stinger don't seem to shock him anymore.]

The rubber flogger is an implement Kaelah and I bought in a gay sex shop. I suppose gay kinksters are mighty tough, because it is one wicked little implement. Those rubber tails sting like hell. [I can confirm that. I was the first one to regret we bought that nasty thing.] The flogger features prominently in a roleplay scene we once did which Kaelah described in her post The First Cut Is The Deepest. We rarely used it on video, though. The only scene we filmed where we used it extensively was the football bet with Leia Ann-Woods, where Kaelah gave me a back whipping with it. As a matter of fact, that was the only time I ever received the flogger on video or in private, except for a few tryout strokes. I was curious how it would feel to get an extended bottom whipping with it, so that was my wager for the World Cup bet. [Obviously your previous experience with the back whipping didn't cure you from your curiosity. But maybe that's only because too much time has passed since we filmed that football bet clip.]

Earlier today, I bent over our new whipping bench and Kaelah went to work. She gave me ten strokes with the forehand followed by ten with the backhand, then four segments of five alternating between the forehand and backhand, and finally the last three strokes forehand, backhand, forehand. [I have to admit I am proud that I can handle the flogger rather well with both my forehand and my backhand nowadays. In my view it is almost more difficult to apply accurately than a cane.] Interestingly, the backhand hurt more, probably because I am less used to that side. [Ludwig counted for me. After the first three strokes with the backhand, he counted "three". - "Three? That means there are still 40 strokes left," I told Ludwig. I was quickly reassured that what he meant was three backhand strokes and 13 strokes in total. For a moment I thought about restarting at three. But since I am such a nice person and all... Ludwig's slight nervousness after my remark was fun, though!] 

All in all, it wasn't as bad as I had anticipated [good to know, I will remember that comment the next time], but I still squirmed more than usual. Kaelah was quite pleased with that, teasing me: "This would have been a fun video!" Alas, you only get to see some pictures of the results. [I very much liked Ludwig's reactions. Interestingly, they were more lively than his reactions to a severe caning. He moaned and wriggled his bottom to ease the pain. There was also some giggling and surprised glances which I enjoyed immensely. I giggled, too, at one point, and Ludwig told me: "That's not funny!" My reply: "It is, at least from my point of view." It definitely was a delightful little scene.] 

In conclusion: the rubber flogger is a perfect implement if you want to cause a significant amount of pain while causing almost no damage. It hurts a lot, but the only visible result is a mild reddening of the skin, maybe a faint red stripe or two. Ideal for people who want to play with it every other day. For the same reason, it is one of the worst possible implements for taking pictures or making a video. I have almost nothing to show for my suffering. Would you believe me if I told you that the flogging today hurt almost as much as the caning from our recent Tit For Tat video? Compare the welts from that one with the barely noticeable reddening in the pictures here. It's ridiculous.

Still, it was a nice little scene to do [agreed!], and I hope you do enjoy the pictures even if there are hardly any marks to see.

Happy Holidays, Busy Holidays

Kaelah and I would like to wish all of you happy holidays and a "guten Rutsch" into the year 2015. We had a nice Christmas dinner yesterday (as you may know, Germans celebrate on the 24th) and an altogether lovely start to the holiday season. Now, we are going to spend the final days of the year meeting family and friends, but also enjoying time together with just the two of us.

Unfortunately, we do not have a Christmas present for you this year. Not an audio story like last year, not a set of pictures as in 2012, and not a video clip as in some of the years before that. Sorry about that. Then again, given that we published our Office Discipline video only a month ago and some Santa Claus-themed pictures in early December, maybe you will find it in your hearts to forgive us. It is the season of love, after all.

The upside: the reason why we do not have a present this year is not that we are slacking off, but quite the contrary. I've been busy editing the severe 50 stroke caning scene which Kaelah and I filmed back in 2009, which we aim to finally publish before we close the blog next spring. The preview picture we posted is one of our most popular pictures ever. I intended to have the video ready for publication by today, but it turned out to be a very complicated editing job and simply too much work for the time available (trying to cut down several hours of "documentary footage" we shot so that the video contains all the interesting bits without becoming overlong and indigestible). So I have to postpone it until January. We also have some other videos in the pipeline, including the two shorter ones left over from our LOL day vote and some great and yet unpublished stuff we filmed years ago with Pandora Blake.

Moreover, we might use the holidays for some additional CP action for you to see. For one thing, I still have a bare bottom flogging coming to me from our betting on the Football World Cup, and Kaelah a hand spanking. You will get to see pictures of the results before too long.

Oh, and lastly, here is something I've been meaning to do for some time. Actually, maybe you can regard it as a Christmas present of sorts after all. I have added a new Our Pictures tag to all our picture posts which we have published over the years. While I'm the video buff, Kaelah is the photography buff among the two of us and it is past time to give all the beautiful photographs we have made (most of which were her idea and her work) a tag of their own so that you can find them more easily.

Happy holidays, everyone!

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?

Naughty or Nice?

December 6th is St. Nicholas Day in Germany. So, tell me, have you been naughty or nice?

Maybe you want to sit on Mrs Santa's lap and tell her about all the good deeds and the naughty things which you have done?

I guess some of you will end up over her knees for a good birching afterwards.

But maybe Mrs Santa also needs a taste of the birch herself from time to time?

Wishing you all a bright red bottom on St. Nicholas Day!

(Probably) My Last Jolly Good Rant

Whenever I felt the need to have a jolly good rant about something on this blog, I published it with the tag "guerilla warfare". Out of 475 total posts at the time of this writing, 21 fall under that label. So Kaelah (who contributed some "guerilla warfare" pieces) and I haven't done an inordinate amount of ranting. Actually, compared to some other BDSM-themed blogs, we are rather tame. But we have had our share of rants over the years, and when we did, we always made sure that it wasn't just random raging and letting off steam, but backed up by good arguments as well.

I have ranted against reactionary tabloid rags, anti-porn feminists, hypocritical kinksters who live by the motto "Everyone kinkier than me is a pervert!", video pirates, live traffic feeds compromising the privacy of BDSM blog readers, and against the arbitrary censorship policy of online billing services. A good variety of targets. Most of the time, though, my opposition was against the advocates of censorship, whether they were politicians, political activists or even kinksters themselves. Admittedly, there is a healthy dose of self-interest in my stance, because I am into BDSM, have friends who are into BDSM and enjoy watching BDSM porn. But I have a more far-reaching motivation as well. I truly believe that how much freedom a society grants its citizens in regards to sexuality and the expression of sexuality in erotic literature or erotic films is a good yardstick for how much individual freedom a society grants its citizens in general. Those societies which are liberal towards porn tend to be liberal in other ways as well, and those who are restrictive towards porn tend to be restrictive in other ways as well. Therefore, there is a legitimate worry that, if the self-appointed moral guardians succeed in censoring porn which is produced by consenting adults, they will proceed to censor other forms of expression or opinions they dislike as well. All for the sake of "protecting minors" or "upholding family values", of course!

How about one more rant, then, before we close down the blog next spring? This will probably be my last one, and I am launching into it because of present events.

The UK has changed its law in regards to what kind of content porn producers can sell online as "video on demand". UK distributors are no longer allowed to sell content depicting bondage and gags, fisting, public sex, age play, facesitting, urination, female ejaculation, and spanking and caning beyond what is deemed “transient and trifling”.

Even as censorship legislation goes, this is a particularly idiotic and ill-conceived piece. Pandora Blake points out one if its many major inconsistencies:

With these restrictions, distributing images of acts which are legal to consensually practice – such as piss play, bondage and fisting – becomes illegal. It’s fine to do it, but not to sell images of it. Obscenity legislation is meant to prevent the publication of images which might corrupt those watching – in other words, stop people from being tempted to try something that is deemed “extreme”. But quite aside from whether porn does in fact corrupt (and the evidence shows that it doesn’t), if trying it would not actually be illegal, why do the images matter?

Why indeed? Hywel Phillips (Elegance Studios) is equally, and rightfully, incredulous:

Let’s just be clear about how ludicrous the very concept is before we get on to the grossly offensive nature of the restrictions they impose. We’re talking about acts which are entirely legal to do – like doing a BDSM scene with someone where someone is bound and gagged. Or spanking. Or female ejaculation. Or face-sitting. So it’s legal to do it. It’s legal to own pictures and video of it. It’s legal to make pictures and video of it. It’s legal to download it from a site outside the UK, even if the customer is in the UK.

But as of 1st December, it is no longer legal for a UK production team to show it to you.

If you downloaded exactly the same material from a non-UK based site it would be legal for them to sell it to you and legal for you to buy it, watch it and keep it.

What the actual fuck?

I suppose what astonishes me more than anything else is the utterly irrational and arbitrary nature of the list of sexual acts addressed by the legislation. It does not surprise me that those oh-so-awful BDSM practices like bondage, spanking and caning are being targetted - unfortunately, that is to be expected, as they are old favourites of the censors. But why on Earth would anyone want to criminalise the depiction of female ejaculation? What is so threatening about a woman having a squirty orgasm? I suppose it falls outside the scope of Victorian sexual mores, and apparently that is enough for it to be deemed "obscene".

Ironically, then, the legislation turns out to be rather patriarchal and anti-feminist - it is still okay for UK producers to sell depictions of male ejaculation, but not female. Moreover, the legislation disproportionately affects producers of BDSM and spanking porn and, because of the criminalisation of fisting, of gay and lesbian porn as well.

Other kinky bloggers have already made a compelling, richly argued case for why this law is wrong and harmful. Pandora Blake's piece, in particular, is excellent. She also provices a great link list of the media coverage so far, which contains more articles worth reading. All that remains for me to do is urge you to make your voice heard if you are kinky and a UK citizen. You could, for instance...

...write to your MP.
...sign this Change.org petition or another one on 38 Degrees.
...donate to the anti-censorship campaign of Backlash UK.
...come to a protest outside Parliament at midday on Friday, December 12th.

Kaelah and I are neither British nor professional spanking porn producers, so the legislation does not concern us directly. But we are friends with Pandora and others from the UK, and would like to see them produce more great videos without having to worry about legal repercussions. And we know that many of our readers are from the UK. So we would like to express our support for your cause and send you our very best wishes. Good luck!