A History of Darkness

Last month, while I was in New Jersey, Dreams of Spanking released one of my favorite scenes that I’ve ever done. It’s called Playing Truant. We filmed it just under a year ago, when Pandora visited me and Paul in Los Angeles.

There are a lot of different kinds of spanking roleplay scenes that I like. I like positive scenes in which enthusiastic consent is obvious in the roleplay. I like nurturing scenes, with loving but strict discipline being meted out, preferably right before bed to a girl dressed in pajamas. I like strict and austere school scenes, full of formality, apprehension and the inevitability of punishment. I like scenes that get funny, with banter that is hard not to crack up at. And I get to experience these sorts of scenes quite regularly. Chances are, any given shoot I do is going to scratch my itch for an old fashioned, OTK spanking or a school punishment. It might not be my exact fantasy, but it gets pretty close pretty often. And when I’m not filming, it’s very easy to get people to do these sorts of scenes with me. They don’t require anything too complex, and they aren’t particularly challenging for either party to “get into.”

But there’s something else that I’ve always fantasized about, and which has become a much bigger interest of mine in terms of actual play in the past couple of years. That’s dark, non consensually themed scenes. These are scenes that I get to film very rarely, and that’s what I got to do during the shoot in question. I talked a lot about wanting to do this film in the behind the scenes footage that’s included with it, but there’s a lot more on the topic of darker scenes that I’d like to explore.

I’ve been interested in non consensual themes for as long as I’ve been interested in spanking itself. I didn’t know that consensual spanking was even an option on the table when my fantasies first blossomed. Still, because I wanted to be spanked, the characters in my fantasies didn’t offer much resistance to the punishment they were about to receive.

I don’t think my fantasies began to grow truly dark until I was a teenager. By then, I had a pretty decent understanding of the concept that I could enjoy the fantastical idea of something without in some way supporting something negative or dangerous. This is a complicated topic itself, and one for it’s own post at some point, but it was freeing for me when I came to this realization. Many of my fantasies began to center around power that is taken unfairly or used in ways it wasn’t meant to be used. These were my first fantasies to include sexual elements, and that sexuality was always very non-consensual.

When I came into the scene about four years ago, I stepped away from these fantasies for a while. They aren’t commonly portrayed in spanking media, and no one I got to know in the scene played that way. The thought of describing these desires to someone became uncomfortable to me, especially because I hold such strong opinions about consent “in the real world.” Besides, I had no practical experience combining my sexuality and my kink, and I was very uncomfortable with the concept of putting it into practice. I wasn’t sure if I would even like those sorts of scenes in reality, and I didn’t feel comfortable to share that sort of darkness with anyone.

It takes an incredible amount of trust to want to play with someone this way. Specifically, you have to trust that the fantasy you are enacting is just a fantasy, and not a real desire for someone to do harm. You have to trust that the character your partner is playing is a character, and not a revelation of their hidden, true nature. You have to trust them to use the vulnerability you are about to give them only in the ways that you’ve consented to and with your best interests in mind.

At the same time, you have to trust them not to be afraid of you. When you explain to someone that you want to do something which is dark and taboo, you have to trust them not to judge you. You have to trust them to still respect you as a strong and capable person after you’ve shown them that you want to be helpless and victimized in a scene. You have to trust them to find a balance of taking your fantasy seriously while knowing that the character you want to be isn’t the way you want to be treated outside of the fantasy. You have to trust that if you push back and protest and get angry in the scene, that they won’t be hurt or offended in real life. You have to both understand that a scene is a scene, and as long as things go the way they are negotiated, what happens there doesn’t negatively effect things outside of the scene space.

In short, it takes everything that one worries about when going into BDSM in the first place and intensifies it.

The process of building that kind of trust with Paul took place over a couple of months, as we got to know each other. We first started to play together on camera, and that was very liberating. There are clear boundaries set in terms of what is a scene and what is real life when the camera is rolling. When you call “cut!” then it goes back to the real world and you can feel assured that, if the scene is going badly for you, that transformation from scene-space to “real life” will be immediate. There’s also comfort to be taken in the fact that everyone involved knows that what you do in the scene is simply acting. I had a lot of hang ups about resistance vs. being a “good” submissive and taking whatever I was given without reaction at that time in my life, but when I was playing for the camera, none of that mattered. There were a few hiccups as Paul and I transitioned to playing off camera, where I took things too seriously, but he was always supportive and loving towards me, even before we started dating. It didn’t take long before I could just relax and trust him, and once that happened, our play really took off.

Paul and I started actually dating during a time when he was in England and I was in the US, and we were making plans to get together at a cabin for an extended visit. During this time, I watched an incredible amount of spanking porn. It was the most I had watched since I was a teenager. I primarily watched Northern Spanking, but I also watched a lot of Dreams of Spanking and, since I had recently shot for the site and had therefore received a performer account for the first time, I began to explore Nimue’s World. I remembered that Paul had done a few films for this site, so I checked them out.

One of the films which he had acted in was called “I’ve Seen You” and it was very similar to the scene that I ended up doing for Dreams of Spanking. It involved Nimue playing a school girl who behaves sluttily, and Paul being a skeezy business man who was been watching her out the window. He follows Nimue home and, when she won’t respond to his sexual advances, beats her thighs severely with the tawse.

I became pretty obsessed with this film. I even saved it to my phone so I could watch it when I was out of the house. It was pretty much the hottest thing I had ever seen in my life. In my mind, it would have only been able to be hotter if there had been actual “forced” sex involved.

I was able to communicate with Paul about what kinds of scenes I was craving before we got to the cabin, and because we have unprecedented compatibility, what we wanted was very much in line. I relaxed and was able to play without worrying about outside things: that trust had been built, and it was built in a way which was pretty unbreakable. There was one other thing I wanted, though, which hadn’t been brought up before.

Asking someone for something like a dark, non-consensual scene with a lot of resistance and themes of forced sex isn’t the easiest thing to do. However, I had a wonderful tool in starting this conversation: porn. Specifically, I had the scene that he had done with Nimue. When I got up the courage to talk to him, all I had to say was “Remember that really dark scene that you did with Nimue?” Paul, of course, remembered. “I want to do something like that,” I told him. And so we did. Like that. It was magical and perfect, and it became something we can do when we want to.

When Pandora came to visit us last year, Paul and I both shot scenes for Dreams of Spanking. I don’t remember how the conversation came up, but I decided that I wanted to do a scene like this on video. Doing it on video was different only in that I had to worry about what people would be comfortable seeing. I was a little worried that people would be unsettled by some parts of the scene that I wanted to do, but I also kind of give 0 fucks about the limits that other people want to put on my sexuality and figured that Pandora would give viewers fair warning that the film included edgy, consensual non-consent situations.

Before we filmed the scene, Pandora interviewed both of us fairly extensively. This is important when showing people who aren’t familiar with us as people or as a couple a film that has these extreme themes in it, and the fact that I knew Pandora would do this is part of the reason why I felt so comfortable doing this scene for Dreams of Spanking. We both talked for a long time separately, and then together. I feel like it was one of the rare times that I was able to be articulate when being verbally interviewed, although at one point I got a little emotional and teared up when talking about what it’s like to be in a relationship where I’m loved as much as I am in this one.

The entirety of this interview is available for free on youtube. Oh, look, I embedded it for you!

This video is basically a 20 minute documentary on our relationship, which is a pretty special thing to have, when you think about it!

After we finished the interviews, we filmed the scene. In my opinion, it was one of the hottest things that ever happened in history. It was made more hot by the fact that I was aware that I was being filmed, that Pandora was watching this unfold and that Ten was in the other room and could hear us. I imagined strangers on the internet watching me in such a vulnerable state and the thought excited me. I felt wonderful to take what had felt like my ultimate taboo activity and put it in the public eye. It was freeing and liberating.

At one point, while we were in the middle of filming the scene, there was a knock on the door. Paul left me lying naked on the couch and went and opened it. I was afraid that it was the police: I had been yelling and protesting while he was beating me for the past several minutes, after all. Instead, I heard a meek voice say “We are missionaries…”

Paul didn’t break character at all. “That’s nice. Bye,” he said, slamming the door. As he walked back over to me, I realized that he still had the tawse in his hand. No missionaries have come to our house ever since. 0_0 I’m kind of disappointed that Pandora turned the camera off before Paul opened the door. It was pretty epic.

The scene itself was epic, too, and it ended with the implication of forced sexual activity (no, there is no actual penis in the film). This was my idea to include, and the negotiation of it was making it something that Paul was comfortable with filming. I love the fact that this is included in the behind the scenes, too. I think it’s important to show that Tops’ limits are equally as important as those of bottoms.

After a scene this intense, I needed a lot of cuddling, although I wasn’t upset by it. I was actually very joyful, but slightly disoriented from all the endorphins. If you watch the behind the scenes footage, you’ll hear me talking in my happy, childlike voice and giggling as I snuggle on Paul’s lap. That’s another thing that I think is important for people to see: that everything about this scene had a positive effect on me.

The whole point of Dreams of Spanking is that it’s about the women and their gaze, instead of  the women being objects for men to view. Every scene that I do is about me, but I’ve never felt like a scene was more about me as a person. This took something that I felt like I had to keep hidden from people and celebrated it. We did it my way, with my partner, in my home. All of the behind the scenes footage shows people who I am. I remember snuggling on Paul’s lap after we filmed this and just feeling good about myself.

Very few people commented on this scene, and a couple of people let me know that, despite all the behind the scenes materials, it made them uncomfortable. But I was elated to see that Girl on the Net wrote about wanting to use this scene as a negotiation tool in a post to the Dreams of Spanking blog. It was particularly exciting to me because if it wasn’t for Nimue’s World, I don’t know if I would have even known how to bring the subject of wanting to play this way up to Paul. I feel like, in a way, I was able to pay that forward with this film. I hope that people who share my fantasies will enjoy the scene, but I hope that others who don’t can still understand the importance of it. There’s nothing wrong with having taboo fantasies that you act out in a healthy, well negotiated, safe way. ❤︎