Anal as a punishment?

I'm glad my readers are used to TMI from me because I'm going to be specializing in it today and tomorrow :D.

I was reading in the Saturday Spankings blog hop last week when the idea for this post came to me.

Short blurb- have you checked out that hop beyond my own snippets shared on this blog?

If not, make sure to read all the participants this week. Their links will be at the bottom of my post.

While I and a few author others (like Emily Tilton) dance a not quite solid line between "domestic discipline or spanking fiction" and BDSM erotica/erotic romance, the hop is primarily about spanking fiction. I love reading widely in this genre; I was so glad when I happened upon Sue Lyndon's "Dark Without You" and discovered the genre. Through this genre I've also managed to broaden out into other genres, kinks that I'd never read before. Can you imagine that I'd never read an ageplay book? But Breanna Hayse is among the community of spanking fiction authors, so in her "The Game Plan" I read my first ageplay book and loved it.

I don't know, maybe it's my own outlook more, but it made sense to me that in spanking fiction, anal activity would be a norm. As in the use of fingers, sex toys, penises in the anus. I wasn't surprised to find that. What I do struggle with and the reason behind this blog post, is that anal activity is used as a punishment in some spanking fiction. I really haven't read the genre widely enough to make quantitative comments like "often," "always," or "sometimes."

Now I need to explain my struggle with some of my sexual history- see, I told you I'd get TMI hehe. Much of my sexual history starts off with the fact that I didn't get appropriate, comprehensive sexual education at school or at home- my school district use abstinence-only sex ed and my parents avoided the topic. This lead to a number of problems for me (including not having the language or knowledge to say that I didn't want to have sex when I was 13). Thankfully when I came out as bisexual when I was 15, I wasn't too far from the only (at the time) LGBT community center in Michigan. It was there in the youth group that caring adults where able to fill in the huge gaps in my sexual education. I learned about all number of things from STDs, safer sex, and the fact that my sexuality was my own. It was also there that notions such as "anal sex is dirty" started to be pushed out of my thoughts and any other moralizing thoughts of what is right/wrong in sex. Consent was the only important thing in my book.

Things get a bit messy (please forgive the pun :D) because I realized around this time that I loved anal sex, but that for me, it included deep feelings of submission so I decided to save it as something I only did with dominants. See, my first girlfriend had introduced me to Anne Rice's "Sleeping Beauty" trilogy and while I wasn't old enough legally to get my hands on information about BDSM, I knew I was interested. I loved Beauty's deep submissions- I longed to feel that for a dominant. Of course through various fits and starts of trying BDSM on for size, I got to where I am now- wearing my Master's collar for about 13 years now.

Anal activities have been one of the most trying issues- I'll be writing on it more in the "Submission- in or out of the bedroom, or both?" for the Spanking Romance Reviews round table discussion blog hop tomorrow. I can't tell you how many years ago it's been now, but I had a health issue that meant we had to avoid any anal activity for several months. In my head, I managed to start associating "anal" with "pain" in a way I never had. That's a big problem- you see, my Master and I both love anal intercourse. And somewhere between being the mythical "perfect slave" and my own super active life, I couldn't manage to say "Master, can we please use some lube? No lube, like we're used to, just isn't working now." Yes, I finally did say those words to Him, but our sex life and my mental health around sexual issues weren't doing so good during the years (yes, years) it took me to get from the health issue- being medically cleared to engage in anal activities- me saying what I needed to say.

So having read my struggles around anal activity, I can imagine people will understand why "anal as a punishment [in spanking fiction]" gives me pause. Anything that puts sexual anal activity in a negative light gives me pause. It's part of the homophobic knee jerk response that allows the dichotomy of "two men are gross" while "two woman are hot." I also think in our society lives with too many schizophrenic mixed messages about sexuality. That's not to say that I don't get aroused from reading "anal as punishment" scenes within spanking fiction- I very much do- but I do struggle because for me, I don't bring any of the humiliation, the "teehee, it's naughty" type stuff into my IRL sex life. True, it's fiction, but it's fiction meant to arouse. This is a dichotomy I walk in my own fiction because I want to show living, healthy BDSM relationships.

Thinking on this post as I was doing laundry (because my life includes service, sex, submission- multiple pieces of BDSM), I realized- part of the way my sexuality works, it's not about what "society" approves or disapproves of, it's what my Master and His thoughts added to the parts of me that refuse to mesh with what He thinks. For example, I love enema play but unfortunately it's a hard limit for Him. Now my Master's sexuality, personality is such that He doesn't care much of what society thinks either- in a way, taking me further away from the "mainstream" that He teases I don't understand because I'm not part of it. This has all led me to a place where notions such as "naughty," "dirty" only have power if they do to Him. He experiences anal as enjoyable so therefore that's my primary outlook. I really can't imagine ever using anal anything as a punishment.

And I've managed now to write most of this post without mentioning any of my own writing by name- I'm so proud :D. But talking about anal does make me think on my Vala's Story series. I started writing it as a 19-ish year old in love with her Dom, enjoying great sex. So at least in "Out of the Night: Book One" for sure, the sex was written before my health issue, before the struggles with anal, before motherhood, full times jobs, aging made my Master's and my sex life look different than it did when I was in my early 20s and He was in His late 20s, early 30s. As The Queen says of Vala in one of the books, "Pull her hair and she is ready to be bent over and fucked up the ass," yeah at one time my Master could say that of me, but nowadays, I need a little time, a little warm up, a little "the teen is off in his bedroom, asleep, and I'll push all the cleaning that needs done out of my head so I can enjoy You fucking my ass, Master, because I really wanna enjoy it too."