Kneeling In the Corner

If you’ve visited here for any length of time you know I take great pleasure in dissolving slavish needs and desires into their constituent parts. Not much else for me to do with beloved so far away. And it is fun: sort of a cerebral equivalent of wanking.

One D/s theme that often exerts a fascination over me is punishment. Punishment can be play and, well, punishment. The fuzziness separating the two experiences confuses many people.

Punishment as play is one of the easiest ways for a sadist and masochist to engage each other’s respective desires. To a degree it is a theatrical pretext.

Punishment for being slow, breaking a rule, failing to perform - at least for me - can be a deeper experience. It is where the submissive man meets the masochistic man.

Being struck as a prompting or correction heightens the desire to please. Well, something like that. This is one of those funny emotional areas where it seems almost impossible to capture the various and nuanced feelings of the moment.

I’d never err to be punished. At least not with Alexandra. The few times I recall being punished, never more than a few quick blows, hit me on a level I don’t quite understand. Probably I’m tapping into some very basic childhood experiences. You really do feel that you’ve been at fault and deserve what you are getting. But without the blows being any harder it ‘hurts’ more. That could be thought as sounding very self-destructive. But I’ve never felt any psychic injury. In recollection I’ve been amazed by the depth of feeling it evoked.

In writing about being treated as an object, with indifference my earlier attempt to explore punishment as punishment came to mind. Being ignored seemed the strongest non-physical (and hence not offering masochistic satisfaction) I could think of.

It is an experience that even if it is something you might fantasize about would be very different in actually experiencing.

I’ve wondered what it would be like to be left in a dark closet. External stimuli cut to a minimum. The world reduced to a few square feet.

Or being left kneeling in a corner. Facing mirrors. If your eyes are open you see yourself as a chastised and restrained - if only by her words - slave.

My first thoughts of BDSM and mirrors were of whippings. What would it be like to watch your face as it responded to pain? Though I close my eyes often (Alexandra started forbidding me to do that shortly before she left).

The image of kneeling there, watching yourself wait for permission to move … what do you think?

Earlier: How Do You Punish a Masochist