Cruising Through Spankoville . . .

I was surfing around last night, looking for like-themed blogs to link to, and trying to get some handle on what D/s bloggers tend to write about. . . . and one thing became quickly apparent.

Lots of people are into being spanked.

Now, this is not My thing, but OK, there are lots of flavors out there and I applaud everyone who's pursuing what they need within the bounds of safety and legality and respect/concern for others.

Being Domme, I of course think of spanking from the giver's persepctive. And that viewpoint seems under-represented, at least from My admittedly unscientific recent survey.

The giving of pain is a tricky affair, and I don't mean in the "technical" (i. e., safety) aspect. That's important but ultimately a matter of technique/practice. Where's it tricky is what is means to and how it's used by the giver. There are sadists, who actually receive gratification from the mere inflicting of the pain, from the recipient's reaction to feeling that pain. For sadists, I am guessing it is a less complicated affair.

For Me, pain is a gateway, an opening to something else. Or, more correctly, an opening to the possibility of something else, and that something else is hopefully deeper, more "important" than the actual pain itself. For that reason I tend to avoid true pain sluts, as I find them . . . hmmm . . . ultimately uninteresting. Greed in a submissive is useful, because it can be played with, molded, to increase the level of submission. But pain sluts (often) are so singularly focused on getting the requisite amount of pain that submission gets lost in the process. They will top from the bottom, Top outright, etc., to advance their singular agenda. Like all "clinical" fetishists, true pain sluts end up being extremely self-limiting. This is not a judgement, simply a recognition of the fact that what I seek in a submissive encompasses so much that anyone who is focsued on one thing is usually incapable of expanding herself to serve Me adequately.

Now there is pain and there is pain. Spanking is pain, technically, but certainly it's vastly different from, say, whipping, or needles, for instance. And in that, perhaps is part of its appeal? I don't know, I'm specualting here that perhaps the (usually) limited nature of it and the obvious connection to infantilization offer a kind of inherent safety to those who enjoy being spanked. Since I abhor all forms of age play, that's one obvious reason that spanking per se is not in My repetoire.

As the giver, I want pain, when used, to mean something, to be that gateway I spoke of above. So, what's that "something?"

Hm . . . hard to express in words (harder still that I sit down and try to explain it clearly in more or less clinical fashion). The short but unstaisfying answer is I konw it when I see it, and the submissive knows it when she feels it. The more complicated answer is . . . "the shrinkage of the self." All of us . . . a have a shell, that's pretty hard. I seek, in My slaves, to systematically loosen/soften that shell . . . in order to help them embrace the ultiamte freedom that lies in giving that up. At times the shell must be cracked, hard, at other times, tricked, massaged, gently manipulated. Pain is one tool for making a crack, or widening an existing one. It's a commodity, another tool in My Magic Bag. Humilation is another. The giving or withholding of orgasm is another. The point is that, for Me, pain's just a tool . . . and as such no better or wrose than other tools in the bag. A hammer's no better than a screwdriver, inherently. But many Dominants fall prey to using the hammer to loosen a screw, overly influenced perhaps by Their submissives' desires (or simply becasue they like the hammer best, which then makes it not a trap at all, but an expression of what the Dominant wants, which, lest we forget, is what this is all supposed to be about).

So, I guess it ends up for Me that spanking, as a certain form of pain, is just a another kind of tool. It's not one that I want/need to use, is all. And it's popularity . . . well, that's something I'm still sturggling a bit to comprehend.

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