KOTW: Punishment- The Fun Kind

Last time that I posted, it was about my real-life punishment dynamics. This week's KOTW (kink of the week) topic is Funishment, or play punishment. This a wonderfully related topic which allows me to continue on my previous train-of-thought. (Thanks, Jade!)

As I stated last post, I didn't start out in the scene with any kind of dynamic that included play-punishment, or really, play spankings of any kind. Spankings were srs business only. When I started to play with my previous play partner, J, we never had any sort of disciplinary relationship, or any kind of power-exchange at all. It took a while for me to get used to this, at first. The spankings kind of just "happened." I came over and we talked and cuddled, then he spanked me because he liked spanking girls and I wanted to be spanked. Afterwards, I would usually make him some kind of baked good, often without returning to my proper state of dress so he could watch me bob around his kitchen in an apron with my red, swollen bottom on display. It was a great tradition, and I loved those scenes, but it often left me feeling unfulfilled, like something was missing from the interaction that we had just had.

One day, I came over and J. suggested that we do a roleplay scene instead of our "usual." I felt really hesitant about this. "I don't even know how to do that," I remember saying nervously. I had never done anything even vaguely like this before, and I was afraid that I'd somehow fail miserably at it and "ruin" the scene. J. coaxed me into it, suggesting that we play a scene in which my character had similar traits to the ones that I was expressing: nervousness and apprehension are by no means uncommon parts of a lot of spanking scenarios. So we decided to do a scene in which a girl who had never been spanked before was being punished afterschool by a teacher for consistently being late to class. Now, this scene seems so typical and almost unexciting, but at the time, my heart raced. I went into the other room, and we agreed that when I came back in, we'd begin playing.

I stood at the door with my hand on the knob, trying to channel my personal jitteriness into that which I felt belonged to my character. The scene was actually very similar to the things that I had fantasized about for a long time, so I knew how I expected it to go, but I couldn't quite relax. I stood there waiting for a good five minutes before I came out. J. was sitting on the sofa wearing dress pants, a button-up shirt and a tie. I felt my stomach twitch when I saw his serious, annoyed looking facial expression.

"This meeting started five minutes ago, Alex," he chided. "Do you really think it's a good idea to be late to a discussion about your tardiness?"

I felt my face grow hot and I looked down at the ground, nervously twirling my hair and fiddling with a stray string on my dress. "Sorry," was all I managed. I felt unsure about "how I was doing" as a roleplayer, but I felt very immersed in the scene, transfixed by J.'s tone.

J. continued to lecture me, being stern and giving plenty of details about the things that I had done. He was amazing at thinking things up on the fly, and I found myself responding easily and naturally. When it was time for the actual spanking, he pulled me over his lap forcefully and lifted my dress as I gasped and protested. I had never really protested against a spanking before. My attitude towards them had always been passivity, but here, it didn't only feel acceptable to protest, it felt right. J. smacked the back of my leg, hard and corrected me for that sort of behavior and began to give me a flurry of hard spanks, scolding me about how I needed to get myself together and take things seriously instead of flitting around the school in a disorganized mess. It was actually during this spanking, as I was kicking and writhing and J. was pinning me down and punctuating his stern words with firm smacks that I realized what had been missing from my previous scenes with him: energy.

There's a certain energy and drama and that comes from the dance of scolding and protesting that simply isn't there in other kinds of spankings. Some atmospheres create a strong but different energy, like the reaffirmative spankings that I mentioned before, which focus on giving an intense reminder of each partner's role in the dynamic, or spankings that are done for emotional release ("just because you need to be beaten") or as a love act. I love these sorts of scenes, and I do enjoy having entirely arbitrary "just for the love of spanking" scenes now and again, too, but my mind draws itself back to punishment scenarios again and again and again.

J. and I had a successful first roleplay, and we began doing more and more scenes like that, sometimes following up on others which we had done earlier. Still, we played infrequently and mixed our previous "standard" play with the roleplay punishments, so I probably only did a total of ten roleplays before I moved.

Malignus and I never roleplayed together. In fact, we very rarely engaged in play-punishment of any kind, as I felt like I wasn't being sufficiently submissive if I intentionally misbehaved, and he tended to respond to things like that with removal of attention instead of "feeding into it" by punishing the perpetrator. During this time I became very focused on the idea of being a good girl and being as submissive as possible, so when I went to my first spanking get together, I felt at a loss as the other girls ran around doing complex pranks. A friend who was similarly into being good and I made an attempt at hiding an implement at one point, but we ended up wussing out and returned it to it's rightful place. I received no play punishment spankings at that party.

When I went to my first national spanking party later that year (TASSP), I was very nervous about how I was supposed to act. The first night, I found myself sitting with Pandora Blake on the floor of Joe and Ten's suite, having a conversation about this. I expressed my concerns about not knowing how to "brat" and Pandora gave me suggestions based on her experience. We came to the conclusion that intentional misbehavior can't be too annoying, can't be actually malicious or damaging to people or things and should be clever and/or funny. With this in mind, we got a magic marker from somewhere and crawled over to where IMLX was seated and began drawing cats on the bottom of his bare foot. IMLX and I knew each other from the internet and I knew that he was good natured, so he seemed like a good candidate for our naughtiness. It took him a surprisingly long time to realize that cats were being drawn on his foot. I don't know what that says about him as a person. :P When he did figure it out, he playfully spanked both of us, scolding us (including in Russian!) for being naughty, cat-on-foot-drawing girls. It was seriously playfully, and I was seriously pleased.

Overtime, I sort of grew into myself in this regard, and began to figure out ways to initiate playfully punitive scenes. Sometimes I planned roleplay scenarios with people that I liked. Other times, I just whined a little. This seemed to work wonders. :P

My bottom after one such play punishment!

My play punishment life took a turn for the "more frequent" when I became friends with Bad Alex. Why? Because Bad Alex is fucking Bad, and she's amazingly good at it. Her mind is a machine that takes a simple idea and turns it into the most trouble possible. Besides being good at raising hell and getting herself spanked, she's also magically able to get me into play-trouble to degrees that I've never known were possible. For example, at BBW she set things up so I got 16 strokes of the cane because she punched me in the knee. That's talent right there. I'm still kinda reeling from that almost a year later.

When in the "principal's office" and her partner in crime, cutieotk is about to get paddled, Bad Alex thinks it's a good time to play Rude Hand Gesture Bingo.

Bad Alex and I like to roleplay together. While some of the roleplays that I do are dark and serious, the ones that include both the Alexes are always kind of off the wall. For example, at July's Crimson Moon party, we played a scene with our friend Jon83 in which we were sisters who had been caught cutting school to go to the mall by our father. I really like roleplaying with Alex when we're not even caught yet: we just banter back and forth as misbehaving girls and giggle an awful lot. When we came back to our hotel room (in the pretend, our home) after having snuck out of school, we were greeted by Jon, who was none to pleased with us. We then started to try to lie our way out of things. My lies were things like "We just ran home to get our books!" but Alex's were things like "It's National Alex Day! No one with our name is allowed at school! We have the day off!" This threw me into a fit of hysterics, and it reminded me of a detail that had never been discussed: we were supposed to be sisters of the same age with the same name. We made a series of jokes back and forth to each other as we tried to figure out why this was until Jon sent Bad Alex to the corner to separate us, pointing to her and saying "That one! Go to the corner!"

This was the only time in my life that I laughed while getting a hard paddling.

We've done other, really fun scenes since then, and we currently have a ridiculously fun roleplay in the planning stages. It involves us pretending to get kicked out of someplace and needing to be picked up by our angry authority figures, who will then scold us all the way home before punishing us quite severely. In a Fetlife conversation on the subject, Bad Alex stated that she had been DOING RESEARCH into ways that we could get into trouble there.

Bad Alex is a winner

When I first started playing with Paul, I had very conflicting feelings about play punishment. At that point in my life, I had never had a D/s relationship which included funishment: these had always been two separate things. Serious disciplinary and D/s relationships vs. fun play partners and Tops with whom I could do roleplays and non-serious, play punishment scenes. Because I felt a strong and very real sense of submission towards Paul (which I had been aware of from the very first time that we played) I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to try to engage in intentional naughtiness to earn fun spankings. It took a while before I realized that this was totally acceptable, helped along the way by the fact that Mila and I really started harassing each other in sisterly antics at that time and Paul happily took to scolding me for things like "internet hair pulling."

By the time that we had our cabin visit my desire to play in this way exploded. Still keeping in mind the principles which Pandora and I had identified, I spent the whole time messing around. Sometimes when I wanted to be spanked (which was most of the time) I would just directly (although very coyly) ask for it. Usually, though, I expressed this want by doing slightly naughty things: climbing on the furniture when there was a sign that said I couldn't, replacing the sign with another one which said I could, naming a chair after Mila and kicking it, opening a desk drawer while I was sitting on his lap at the desk, finding a piece of chalk and using it to draw on the back of his black shirt et cetera. Usually, these things were met with playful, often affectionate spankings that had the "you're a naughty girl" type of attitude but were ultimately just-for-fun. They were hard enough, mind you, but I only ever felt enough like I was in trouble for it to be exciting, not to tap into that set of emotions discussed before.

Following one such spanking at the cabin!

Occasionally, these scenes were more physically severe. One day, after the chalk had been taken away, I opened the same drawer during the same sort of cuddle to find a few paperclips, which I clipped to Paul's shirt collar. Seeming unamused (in a way that I could tell was not genuine displeasure) he called it "abuse of stationary". I called this "bogus." He produced a hairbrush. First, though, he pulled me over his lap on the sofa and spanked my bottom quite hard with his hand, then he moved on to smack the backs of my thighs. It was hard and thorough, and he was stern and strict with me. I was crying quite earnestly by the time that he had finished with my thighs, but he still continued to get the hairbrush and apply it quite effectively as well. I was a mess of tears when it was done, and in a certain way, I felt legitimately contrite, even though I hadn't done anything. It was like I had the relief and security of having been punished without any of the most unenjoyable parts of it, as I knew Paul wasn't actually disappointed in me for wasting paperclips. The spanking was followed with the same snuggles that would come after a real punishment spanking, and I was left feeling blissful and loved.

Now that we're living together, play punishment is a rather big part of the daily routine that Paul and I have developed. Sometimes it's a quick and lighthearted spanking for something like walking outside barefoot and getting leaves all over my feet (which was delivered in the backyard, by the way. Oh the embarrassment!) and other times it's more emotionally intense and physically severe, like the paperclip scene. Still other times, we engage in roleplaying just-for-fun, but with a punishment scenario (such as a scene where when Paul went away to find something to spank me with, I hid in the other room's closet and might have at least gotten away with it for a few minutes if my cat hadn't sat himself down in front of the door and meowed loudly until Paul came and dragged me out).

Ultimately, play punishment is now up there with "reaffirmative" for my favorite day-to-day style of spanking. Besides just being fun, it also opens up the door to a lot of possibilities. For example, I feel horrible about myself if I don't take a real punishment spanking well. If I protest, or move out of position, or make too big of a fuss I just feel terrible inside afterwards, like I didn't properly atone for the original misdeed and I'm still being a disappointment (note: I'm not made to feel this way. It's just residual insecurity). During a play punishment, though, I can happily enjoy thrashing around, resisting, protesting, shouting "No! No! No! No!" and otherwise doing everything in my power not to take my spanking well. It's delightful to be overpowered, to have my protests fall on deaf ears and to be MADE to take the rest of it. It's also wonderfully exciting to play with non-consensual themes during roleplay which I obviously wouldn't be exploring in any other way. There's something invigorating and yes, sexy (gasp!) about that. ♥