CHAPTER ONE

 

I long to tell you my story, to hold your attention on my most intimate parts and most private responses regardless of how embarrassing it feels to be seen so totally naked. Well, let's try to be a bit more honest from the outset and admit that a large part of the gratification I get from being witnessed so frankly is exactly because it is so mortifying. Even as I confess this truth the telltale organ between my legs practically surges to confirm it in the only language it knows-engorging and lubricating in hopeful anticipation of something sexy in its near future. My Master, who I am infinitely fortunate to have as my husband and life partner, let me know that he supports me revealing the narrative of how I got to be as I am and what it is like to be me. He knows better than anyone but me how violently ambivalent I am about my exhibitionism. How I both adore the naughty pleasure I get from being nakedly seen and despise the weakness that makes that external validation seem as necessary to me at times as oxygen.

Let me introduce you to myself. My name is Siobhan, pronounced 'Shivan' for those not accustomed to Gaelic, and my coloration reflects the Irish lineage implied in the name. I have large blue eyes, a pale freckled complexion that doesn't tan well, and slightly curly long auburn hair on my head. My dancer Mother passed on to me her near six-foot height and long graceful limbs, as well as preternaturally firm high B cup breasts, a flat belly, and ample hips. She also drilled into me (quite literally as you will see) a compulsive daily exercise regimen that has endowed me in my mid-thirties with a strong, firm flexible body that men swoon over and women would kill or die for. I am often mistaken for Jessica Chastain, which I feel both complimented and embarrassed by.

My Mother has, according to my psychoanalyst, just about everything to do with how I turned out internally as well as externally. I have followed in her footsteps so closely that it makes me ashamed to have been so weak and lacking in the kind of spirit that might have enabled me to break away from her implacable mold. She was a childhood immigrant from County Cork to the Irish enclave of South Boston, the eldest daughter of 'lace curtain' devout Catholic parents. Her Father was a firefighter who died young of a heart attack on the job when Mother was 13. Grandma barely supported the family by running a dance studio where the daughters of ambitious local families were schooled in the niceties of that demanding discipline. Mother and her two younger sisters helped out at the studio and essentially took care of cleaning and cooking at their cramped apartment to spare the harried widow any stress they could.

Mother always made no bones about the predominance of corporal punishment in the culture of her youth, both in the Auld Sod and in Southie. The whole neighborhood attended Catholic schools and frequent Mass at the local parish of St. Monica, where the priest and nuns all hailed from Ireland and spoke with a comforting brogue. Beneath the superficial Gaelic charm, however, was the Church's problematic vein of sexual repression and fiercely punitive response to any sign of rebellion or wickedness. The whole community fervently believed that a rod spared was a child spoiled. It was universally held that God had designed the human buttocks as the ideal place to deliver necessary chastisement for the Original Sin that inevitably manifested in even the best-behaved children.

So every youngster in the neighborhood grew accustomed to any transgression resulting in some stern grownup raising skirts and lowering pants and underwear so that bare bottoms could be carefully observed to ensure the propriety of their punishment. Spankings were delivered by hands to young children, but once school age was reached the touching of naked buttocks became too tempting for sexually repressed grownups. Thus all manner of implements would be applied to painfully transmit adult disapproval to their squirming targets. Each spanker tended to develop their own favorites, with more enthusiastic perpetrators buying or even making wooden or leather paddles. These would supplement the more conveniently available household items like belts, hairbrushes, or wooden kitchen utensils such as spoons or oven shovels. Switches were often harvested to visit their hated linear swaths of anguish to their tender targets. And rulers were a classroom favorite to redden penitent buttocks bent over the nun's desk so the humiliation of having one's beaten ass bared to one's peers could supplement the anguish.

My Grandma was a great believer in the effectiveness of her own Mother's hairbrush which served double duty by giving each girl child (eventually including me) her obligatory hundred strokes through her hair before bed each night. That formidable instrument was carven from African ebony (the hardest known wood at that time) and purchased at a bazaar in Tangiers by her sailor Grandfather to be passed down the generations. The density and hardness of its three by four inch rectangular back produced an inimitable sting in its terrified targets, often leaving bruises if swung with drunken abandon rather than sober restraint. For my family was not spared the Celtic curse of alcoholism, which manifested in all the man and half the women in the cohort. Children learned to be quiet and careful when the grownups had a wee nip. But even the best-behaved offspring were at risk for sitting uncomfortably for days after the adults had been drinking.

Before her Father's death, discipline in my Mother's family still mainly devolved to the wife since he was often on call and sleeping at the fire station. But he was strict enough that if he caught wind of any of his girls getting spanked by a priest or nun or her mother, he would insist on administering a second dose 'just to make sure the message was received loud and clear'. Mother described his ritual, always enacted at the small table in their cramped kitchen. The penitent, usually already weeping and with a rear end still sore from her original spanking, would meekly bend over the back of her chair and grasp the front of its seat. She would maintain this hold no matter what, since to release it was regarded as challenging Da's authority which would result in a horrific doubling of her dose of bitter medicine. Ma would raise her pleated plaid skirt and hold it up so it would not slip down to interfere with Da's depredations. But before taking her grip she would briskly lower the girl's white cotton panties to her knees, leaving her thighs bare so Da would have the option to spank there if her buttocks were looking too bruised by their combined chastisements. The girls' thighs were less accustomed to this treatment and hence hurt more, so recipients were always ambivalent about this supposed thoughtfulness.

Then Da would remove his belt from his pants, the sound of which my Mother claimed still made her tremble decades after his death even if it was happening in a romantic setting. He would double the broad brown leather belt, step to the left of his trembling naked target, place his left hand on the small of her back next to Ma's holding up her skirt, and begin. His standard dose was a hundred spanks, and like all experienced administrators of such treatments he knew the most sensitive target was the bottom quarter of the buttocks where they met the thighs. Of course, Ma or the nun or priest who delivered the original chastisement would have known the same truth. So that 'sit spot' as it is described in the BDSM community might be too bruised already. This need for discernment was the nominal reason why that community believed that 'on the bare' was the only way to deliver proper punishment out of consideration for the penitent. The real reason probably lay in the murky realm of how erotically exciting sexually repressed adults found naked young buttocks as they writhed and clenched their way through a spanking.

The reason I know all of this minutia about Mother's corporal punishment history is that she delighted in reminiscing about her own derriere's escapades while administering the very same treatment to mine. Somehow hearing the details of her chastisements while receiving identical agonizing attention to my own bare buttocks drilled her experiences into my brain such that they become indistinguishable from my own. She still had her Father's belt and her Mother's heirloom ebony hairbrush, and they were both deployed to chastise my girlish moons from earliest memory until I left home at age 18. And when she died shortly thereafter, as her only child I took possession of them and eventually passed them on to my Master. He delights in using both of them on my bottom at least every week. Which feels kind of nostalgic in a slightly creepy way to be connected to several generations of dead chastened Irishwomen by virtue of shared rear end pain.

So let me explain further how I came heir to my family's stubborn insistence that the best possible technique for disciplining miscreant offspring is a long painful conversation between a hand or other weapon of ass destruction and the penitent's naked buttocks. One might think that my Mother's experiences on the receiving end of corporal punishment would cultivate an aversion to the practice. Well, at least in my Irish enclave, one would be wrong. I'm sure the issue got complicated for her after her Da's death when her grieving Ma seemed to take out her anguish on the pert ballet-sculpted buttocks of her daughters. Previously, she would often 'forget' to inform him of school or home spankings that would call forth his belt to provide the second dose he believed miscreant daughters required. They always felt inordinately grateful for this forbearance, almost gushing their appreciation when she would wink and say confidentially,

"If you girls are extra nice and diligent, we can keep your Da in the dark about this one..."

Once he was gone, however, every trip over her lap to receive the hairbrush was religiously followed by a bare-bottomed excursion bent over the chair to visit with Da's belt. And worse, there would never be the previous interval for their buttocks to recover from the first dose before receiving the second on already chastised nether cheeks. This doubling of distress drove all three of them to try to reach back in vain efforts to mitigate their plight. They felt actually grateful that their Ma's solution to this (after the customary doubling of the dose for rebellion on the first occasion) was to firmly tie four short lengths of soft rope around the feet of the spanking chair. The wrists and ankles of each penitent would thereafter be tied to prevent such impudent interference. What my Mother's Ma confessed to her on her deathbed was that tying her legs apart revealed the forbidden realm usually more or less concealed by modest young women holding their legs firmly together. This led to unwelcome feelings in the very same private parts of the bereaved widow that upset her. In fact, so much that she was enough harder on my Mother's poor bottom that she needed to express her regrets in order to die feeling shriven of that terrible sin.

My analyst and I reached the conclusion that my Mother at that impressionable age of 13 must have unconsciously picked up on her globally frustrated Ma's sexual response to spanking her daughters. That linkage between painful things happening to naked buttocks and exciting feelings developing in nearby vulvas can become hard wired if it is repeated enough times. And any linkage that profoundly reinforced lends itself to epigenetic transmission to offspring, especially if each generation repeats the original conditioning early and often. We suspect that all of the spanking Mothers and spanked girls in my lineage were touching themselves compulsively 'down there' (as I religiously did) once chastisements were complete. Eventually repeated post-chastisement orgasms must further cement the linkage between erogenous punishment and ultimate sexual gratification that has come to rule my own erotic life. And all over 50 years since it all got started by a community of sexually frustrated priests and nuns.

After her Ma's death, my orphaned Mother took over the care of her younger sisters as well as running the dance studio. This felt like an enormous sacrifice to her since she had already won an audition for a place in the regional ballet troupe in Boston. But as usual she sucked it up and dealt with the cold, hard reality of raising two teenage siblings while scrambling to make ends meet on the paltry income from the storefront dance studio. Her younger sisters were not remotely as dutiful as my Mother when it came to trying hard in dance classes or helping out at the studio. So of course their harried guardian turned to the tried-and-true method of discipline as advised by their Priest. Which was to tie them down bent over the spanking chair, raise their skirts, lower their panties, and chastise their buttocks until they broke down and promised to be good. Greatgrandma's ebony hairbrush did a fine job of eliciting this surrender on most occasion, with Da's belt as a backup if the miscreant became stubborn. Mother confessed to me that it was when spanking my Aunties that she first began to notice the naughty feelings between her legs as she whaled on her sisters' cute behinds. This inevitably ended with both parties alone in their beds using their hands to buy that precious island of joyful sexual release in their drab ocean of grief and penury.

Needless to say, both of her sisters arranged to get themselves pregnant and out of my Mother's harsh jurisdiction as soon after graduating high school as possible. And of course neither of them ever danced a step once their pert buttocks were no longer subject to painful consequences for failing to toe the party line and be role models for the studio's customers. Left to her own devices, Mother showed some entrepreneurial spirit and added yoga and aerobics classes for older women to the previously unused daytime hours when local students were in school. She initially exhausted herself teaching them all, but once the studio began generating real money, other teachers could be hired and paid, further raising demand. Soon the neighboring store front was annexed, and she had a truly going concern.

That was when Mother finally felt enough of her head above water to stop shooing away the guys always hitting on her. My Father came on the scene, a charismatic Irishman who had found his way to Mysore India to receive Ashtanga yoga training at the 'mother ship' of that extreme version of the practice. He was an inordinately popular teacher at the studio, amassing an almost cult-like following. Mother felt smitten by his wide blue eyes and powerful body, and at age 22 found herself pregnant with yours truly. My Father was anything but interested in diapers and midnight tantrums, and disappeared from the scene long before I drew my first breath. So there we were, her a single mom at age 23 running a thriving business, and me a newborn girl with no Dad who was being set up to spend her lifetime chasing elusive men.

My Mother saw me as a brand-new version of herself, and not without reason. Her baby pictures were identical to mine, and people in the neighborhood uncomfortable with my bastard status awkwardly joked about me being a clone produced clandestinely at Harvard or MIT across town. Apparently that was easier for the prim Irish community of Southie to swallow than the truth of my out-of-wedlock conception. Our coloration was identical, and Mother openly regarded me as her chance for a 're-do' of her childhood the way she wished it had been. Unfortunately, that commitment to doing things differently didn't extend to how this spirited little girl was to be disciplined. I suspect her experience spanking my Aunties and finding it to be uncomfortably exciting (as well as effective in keeping them under control) made it inevitable that my buttocks were to be routinely bared, bent, and beaten.

I was aware from earliest memory that Mother had a hard life and that an important job for me was not to add to her stresses. But try as I might, I still managed to disappoint her all too often and make her very angry. Whenever that happened, I would feel a terrible sinking sensation in my tummy as I saw the flash of temper in her eyes and the facial flush of her freckled cheeks and the pinching of her generous lips. No matter what I said or did once she was enraged it was going to end with a long and excruciating trip over her lap. By the time I was born she was living in the apartment above the dance studio, and that was where I would face the consequences of my latest sins.

Like many women drawn to the high intensity perfectionistic world of ballet, Mother had an obsessive side and tended to embrace patterns for all manner of aspects of her life. In fact, most of my transgressions were violations of these rituals. And the failure to follow the way something was supposed to be done in her highly ordered world was unacceptable. It could only be interpreted as intentional rebellion, and that crime was only punishable by a thorough dose of rear end anguish.

If my sin occurred in the studio, a mark was placed on the whiteboard in the office where I was to do homework when I wasn't in a dance or yoga or aerobics class. Each feared mark represented a hundred fierce kisses of Grandma's ebony hairbrush on my muscular buttocks. Two marks would mean my bottom cheeks would be lightly bruised and painful to sit on for a week. Three meant that after the double dose Da's belt would be unfurled and I would have a third dose while tied over the very same spanking chair used for Mother's own painful childhood penances. This only happened when she and I came to loggerheads over sex when I was a rebellious teenager. The result was a bottom so sore that one of the nuns felt compelled to report it to Child Protective Services. The ensuing investigation concluded in me going to live with my Aunties until I graduated high school and began my modelling career. Mother and I never spoke after that, and the scandal of her loss of custody of me caused her fitness empire to crumble as even the conservative Irish community turned its back on her. Her body was found floating in Boston Harbor after her suicide, bestowing me with a lifetime legacy of guilt that could only be assuaged, at least temporarily, by a good sound spanking.

That fateful triple dose punishment arose out of the confusing miasma of hostile and erotic feelings that Mother had and passed on to me regarding painful attention to miscreant buttocks. That witch's brew simmered in the unconscious of both of us as I accepted my weekly punishments as just and warranted until I hit puberty. But once my pubic hair came in and my athlete's ass started to assume more womanly contours I suspect her own eroticization of my spankings became obvious on a subliminal level. In an earthy tribute to the power of subliminal connection between her and me I noticed immediately after I started my menses that the intriguing organ between my legs was engorged and lubricated after each chastisement. Naturally I tried to use my fingers to explore those interesting sensations as I was recuperating in my bedroom afterwards. I soon discovered an amazing explosion of pleasure that left my whole body relaxed and peaceful even if my ass hurt like hell.