I saw renowned purveyor of corporal punishment, Miss Amy Hunter in a London rental dungeon last week. I found our session had an extra level of intensity and it has taken me a while to work out why. What I do know is that I was deeply effected by the session, felt a rush of emotion when it finished and was lost deep inside myself on the train home.
Thinking back to the session and those intense feelings, I identified my sense of vulnerability as what set the session apart and so I wrote this about a particular scene mid-way through the session:
There’s a new bench at this dungeon, a long flat bench with half a dozen wide leather straps. I’m not sure Miss H has tied me down before, and I enjoy the increasing sense of restraint as the straps are tightened.
After much action with floggers and a strap, she changes to a weighty paddle and starts smacking me with it. It’s fine at first, a satisfyingly weighty impact into the cheeks of my arse, right then left then right again. Very much my kind of thing. Then she changes up a gear, using her full force and smacking the paddle low down across both cheeks. The impact is solid, and I feel it deep down, a hard, hard impact, unrelenting and fiercely painful.
I have no choice but to vocalise my anguish and I’m in danger of losing control of my reactions. I am acutely conscious of the straps holding me down and my inability to stop the pain or move away from it. I feel intensely vulnerable, small in the face of the onslaught, and close to being overwhelmed by it.
Objectively the pain was not more challenging than the cane strokes she gave me later, but I was ready for that and wasn’t tied down. My resistance to the caning made me feel strong and powerful rather than small and vulnerable. It is the paddle and the bench that is still with me now.
But something was missing in this description. The emotional impact of the session had been about more than being tied down
I recently had something of a breakthrough in my journey through therapy and, in a splurge of blog posts, wrote about how I had reached a deeper understanding and acceptance of how pain, intimacy and sex came to be interchangeable for me.
A key insight was that my intense sessions with Dominatrixes allowed me to access a child-like state that had been denied to me as a child, a state where a demonstration of vulnerability is responded to by care and intimacy.
This understanding has allowed me to lower the barriers around my own vulnerability. After Lyra, who I was with in the USA recently, had beaten me with a belt and a hairbrush, I lay with my head in her lap like a child. After Miss H had caned me, I had hugged her tightly and sobbed out my release, much as a child might do after being hurt or punished.
It’s hard for me to write this. I’m a 6’2” tall, ex rugby player, ex military, ex business head, and I’m sharing thoughts of regressing to childhood. That’s uncomfortable. But I can recognise moments in my kinky journey when this has happened: the American Domme who told me I was “just a little boy;” the way I sobbed child-like into Elita’s hair after I’d been whipped until I broke down.
If I can accept this idea, I don’t need to fight it any more. If a paddling frightens me, I can let that fear show; if a caning makes me feel like crying, then I will cry, confident that my vulnerability will not now be met by a mother who, because of her own horrific upbringing, doesn’t know how to show me the love I need or, worse still, by the harsh ridicule of my peers at school.
In this way I can give my inner child what he missed for most of my life.
Until recently, I sometimes sensed that Miss H was holding back with me, relative to the other men I’ve seen her beat at her corporal punishment parties. Perhaps they show the unemotional stoicism that characterised much of my life. Perhaps she’s unaccustomed to the vulnerability in my reactions to what she’s doing to me.
She recently said she wasn’t always sure where I was in a session and I think this might be why. The truth is that the harder she pushes me, the more solace I will find in the quiet, intimate moments in between the violence; the harder she pushes me, the more release I will find at the end of the session when her hug tells me I’ve done well and she cares for me.