Kink Of The Week for this period is “Caning,” something I know a bit about, having explored both sides of a caning (giver and receiver) extensively. I approached my friend and occasional play partner Honey with the idea that we write about both sides of the caning I had given her at the end of our amazing three-way dungeon session. You can read about that here.
Honey writes first.
I love the cane. It’s a weird thing for me to say because I also fear it. It is that fear that makes it so powerful and takes my feelings about the cane from hate to love.
Everything about a cane is wrong. I love thud and a cane is definitely not that. It whips across my skin setting line after line of fire. I hate the cane. And I love the cane.
I’ve given up trying to manage and to rationalise my relationship with canes. I know that I crave them. I know that there is one person who can cane me so skillfully in tune with my responses that he canes me to and through orgasms. That is quite a mind fuck to be so lost in the pain that I come.
But this post isn’t about that. This post is about being caned until I break. Being caned until, for that moment in time, he and I find where my edge lies. It’s powerful, brutal, terrifying and amazing. It’s something that will stay with me forever and something that, over time, I start to crave again.
The first time, I was in a dungeon, holding onto the hands of my friend and fellow sub and wondering what I had done and what it would be like. I was scared, not of the cane but scared of being disappointing. Even now, I look back on that and shake my head at myself. Nothing about it could ever be disappointing from either side. The trust, the connection, the understanding needed to share that level of violence is incredible.
The second time was even more powerful. This time I knew in advance that he was going to cane me until I break. I knew that he would give me an opportunity to back out with honour. I knew that he would make me ask for it.
All of that makes it even more intense for me. I can’t deflect any responsibility for this. I am asking for it. And more than that, I am asking for him to reach inside himself to do it. It is not a spanking or a paddling. It is a brutal, violent caning. I am so lucky to have a friend who I can ask such a demanding thing of.
As always, the warm up is delicious. A selection of spanks and thwacks. I’m revelling in them, letting my endorphins start to dance. The temptation to ask for just more and more of this is loud in my head. I am loving it. But I won’t ask for this instead of the caning. Ever since it was suggested, I have been squirming away from it while my craving and need has grown stronger and stronger. I know that if I leave that dungeon without seeing it through, I will, later on, cry at what I have missed out on.
So, I ask for it. I make sure that before I speak, there is no timidity in my voice. I need him to know that I want this and I am serious.
I feel him pulling his resolve together at the same time that I am centring my calm. I want to reassure him that it is OK but I don’t want to break his mood.
I purr at the first few strokes that are practice or scene setting and then I need to be ready.
The cane hits are hard and fast and incredibly accurate. I’m trying to count them and the first eight are exciting, the next eight hurt so much, then I lose count and it hurts so much that I start to swear and then comes the “No, no STOP!”
He holds me immediately, covering me with his body. I’m broken, and lost, and utterly invincible and the most sure of who I am. I don’t think that I make sense for quite a time afterwards. I’m floating and high and once I’ve been told that I did well, I’m happy and grinning. And right then, in that time afterwards, I’m probably lucky that our time in the dungeon was close to the end because the only thought that I had in my head was, “Please do it again.”
Here is my side of the story:
There’s no artistry in it.
Is that what troubles me? The lack of art in this brutality?
When I spend 20 minutes tapping all over her body with the cane til her nerve ends are dancing and she’s in a trance, there’s artistry in that. Skill too. And connection.
This though, this is just brutal. Fast, light strokes that soon become fast, heavy strokes; hitting her as hard and fast as I can until she either breaks down or begs me to stop.
Only it’s never quite as hard as I could.
Or as fast.
There is some judgement in it; some reading of her; a conscious adjustment of pace and force so we get where we are heading at the time I have chosen. It’s not completely mindless, this violence.
Though artistry would be a stretch.
I blame Elita. She caned me this way on only our third meeting. Relentless, brutal, hard. I was shocked by it. But enthralled too. So enthralled that I spent the next three years following her deep down a rabbit hole of pain and pleasure. So enthralled I wrote a blog post trying to capture the huge wave of pain she created and the place it left me when it receded; washed up like driftwood on a beach. Now, years on, Google’s search engine still directs hundreds of people there whenever they want truly to find out what it is to be caned.
Doing this with Honey leaves me questioning myself and my motives.
After this session I found myself describing some of what we had done to my therapist, desperately trying to make her see the consent that suffused it, trying to lead her to the beauty Honey and I found in it. She is always wonderfully non-judgemental, but I sensed that here I was stretching her desire to be neutral.
If I am questioning my motives, why should she not do so?
I did it because Honey asked me to. I made her ask me for it because, in this, consent is never enough. I wanted an active request for this very specific thing.
“Please beat me til I break down!”
But, for most people, being asked for this would still not be enough, not to hold a woman down and beat her so mercilessly. Not to push through her tears, remorselessly seeking her full break-down into a sobbing, pleading mass of pain and emotion.
Yet that is what I did and somehow, unbelievably, it became artistry; it became beautiful even, as her masochism and my sadism were, for those few moments, allowed full reign, willing each other on, challenging each other to take it to the very end, then falling hand in hand over the finish line together, gasping, spent.
And later, laughing and hugging, high as kites at what we had done together.
But still I question myself.
What does it say of me that I meted out this level of brutal violence to a women and, in all likelihood, will do so again?
And, worst of all, what does it say of me that my cock was so hard at the end?
Honey has posted both these descriptions too. She’s included an image taken moments after the caning that perfectly captures its brutality. The image makes me uneasy, makes me question anew if this is OK. You can see it here.
More Kink Of The Week on caning here:
I think what strikes me most (please forgive the pun) is the amazing connection between you both. A beautiful thing!