Books I masturbated to as a Teenager Part 1 - "An Anthology of Erotic Prose" *

*This isn't really going to be an ongoing series. Don't worry.

Essential Reading for every 1990s teenager. Possibly.
Essential Reading for me, anyway.

You know, even two years ago, I wouldn't have have guessed that at some point in the future, I'd be sharing my favourite teenage masturbatory literature with the whole of the world wide web. Yet these days, it seems positively normal behaviour. Talk about the most wanked-over book on my teenage bookshelf? Sure, that's a thing I would totally do. In fact, I'm doing it right now.

(Although before we continue, please rid yourself of any mental images that "wanked over" may have conjured up. I didn't mean it literally. I am a lady and therefore tidy and discreet.)

People growing up in the digital age now have a world of porn and erotica just at the other end of a WiFi connection what with your PornHub, Two Girls One Cup and every kind of erotic literature available from the deliciously romantic to the downright bloody weird downloadable onto your kindle in seconds.

Anyone born from the mid eighties onwards would struggle to understand just how difficult it was to get hold of porn before the internet. Especially if you were a well brought-up, massively kinky, somewhat conflicted burgeoning feminist who knew she didn't want to look at 'conventional' Razzle-style pornography but none-the-less wanted a bit of external stimulation to augment the ongoing 18-rated storylines in her head.

Best Value Shag Mag Ever, apparently. Occasionally available in hedges.

I bought An Anthology of Erotic Prose (ed. Derek Parker) some point in my mid-teens. It quickly became very well-thumbed indeed. This collection of over fifty examples of erotic writing was presented chronologically so it started with an excerpt from the Arabian Nights ("The Medinah Girl put her hand to his yard and handled it") and finish with Erica Jong's Fear of Flying ("The zipless fuck was more than just a fuck. It was a platonic ideal.")

The authors included the usual erotic suspects - John Cleland, Casanova, Anais Nin - obviously the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher Masoch both get an entry each. Not to mention half a dozen entries from 'Anon'. He wrote a lot of filth that guy.

Sade and Masoch. Everyone's favourite double act.

There were also a whole bunch of authors not usually associated with erotic writing like Mark Twain, Henry Miller and Gore Vidal. Basically the entire anthology was the equivalent of going through a bunch of books and just reading the dirty bits. Which, let's face it, is what I'd been doing beforehand. It was so much more civilised to have someone do the hard work for me and put inside a pretty cover.

Obviously not everything included in the book was a turn-on. In fact most of it wasn't. But you know it was the 1990s and I was grateful for whatever I could get. Even the stuff that it seemed like it should be my kind of thing (and we all know that my kind of thing generally involves spanking, yes?) didn't always read the way I wanted it to. The extract from Miss Coote's Confession gets off to a promising start when a young woman with a tendency towards thievery is being discussed: "Have they never tried a good whipping?" Miss Cootes asks regarding the girl's parents. She then goes on to offer to cure the girl as long as she is given carte blanche to punish the girl in her own way.

Her own way being a sound thrashing of course. So by and by, the girl is invited over, gets caught red-handed an finds herself stretched out with "her chemise rolled up" awaiting chastisement. I was very fond of this extract for the most part. Ideally I prefer a gentleman to administering the punishment rather than a lady but that's a minor complaint. There's a page or so of the actual punishment which I re-read on many occasions. "You bad girl. Your bottom shall be marked for many a day. I'll wager you don't steal as long as the marks remain."

Problem is the author (the prolific "Anon") blows it in the last few paragraphs when she says "All the spectators are greatly moved and seem to enjoy the sight of Selina's blood dripping down, down till her stockings are saturated and it forms little pools beneath her on the floor."

Ah, right. Blood. Yeah, that's not sexy. I prefer my damn good thrashings to be administered without blood loss, thank you very much. Still, I worked round it. On subsequent occasions, I just remembered to stop reading before I got to that bit.

Another favourite of mine in this anthology was an extract from Jean de Berg's The Image (1956) in which the narrator looks at some photographs of young woman to whom he has been previously introduced called Anne.

The buttocks are marked in every direction by deep lines, very clear and distinct, which crisscross the central crack, more or less stressed according to how hard the whip fell. 

This picture of little Anne chained to her bed, on her knees in a most uncomfortable position, is obviously more moving because of the cruel evidence of the torture she has undergone. The black ironwork forms a pattern of elegant arabesques behind her.

My favourite inclusion in the Anthology, wasn't even a work of a literary prose. Rather it was a letter written in 1785 by an anonymous correspondent to the editor of The Exhibition of Female Flagellants offering helpful advice to the engraver on how best to illustrate women having their backsides thrashed. It is clearly a matter in which he had a deep and resounding interest. "To see the representation of an agreeable young lady having her petticoats pulled up and her pretty pouting backside laid bare and seeming to feel the tingling stripes of a Rod is amusing enough." He recommends that the arses depicted should be "round, plump and large, rather over than under the size which the usual proportions of painters and statuaries would allow." Quite right too.

It was a hugely nostalgic experience reading through this anthology again after several decades. I couldn't find my original copy - I suspect it's up in my parents' loft somewhere so had ordered a replacement from Amazon which is happily exactly the same edition as my original. Everything - from the cover to the layout to the size of the thing (just slightly too large and heavy to comfortably hold in one hand, in case you're wondering) takes me right back to those furtive teenage fumblings. Proust had memories evoked by the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea. I, however, have eighteenth century perverts talking about arses.

If only I could go back and show teenage me what delights were awaiting me in the twenty-first century.That rather than having to trawl through books to find snatches of things that kinda sorta fitted my fantasies, there would be hundreds of books available containing just the sort of thoroughly stern and frequently romantic spankings that I wanted to read about. Just the Victorian and Regency section of the Blushing Books website would have been more than I could have wished for. If I had known back then, the range and variety of filth that would be accessible to middle-aged me, it would have blown my kinky, conflicted, horny little adolescent mind.

Submission, spanking and self-harm

There is a scene in Steven Shainberg’s Secretary where E Edward Grey speaks to Lee, his secretary and submissive, about her history of self-harm. “Is it that sometimes the pain inside has to come to the surface?” he asks her before instructing her to stop doing it. “You will never cut yourself again,” he tells her. “You’re over that now. It’s in the past.”

So instead of self-harming, Lee submits herself to Grey’s command, discovering a world of willing submission and bondage play. The implication is that Lee’s desire to hurt herself and her desire to be punished by Grey are two sides of the same coin. She cures herself of one by fully embracing the other.

I am not sure I accept the link.

I am currently reading Maren Smith’s Holding Hannah in which the protagonist is also a self-harmer. I haven’t finished it yet so I don’t know how the author plans to develop this alongside the book’s BDSM themes but reading it has started me thinking once again about the relationship between self-harm and masochism.

I extensively self-harmed between my mid-teens and mid-twenties. My arms and hands are permanently marked with the small round burn marks and long thin scars which serve as a physical manifestation of the clinical depression I have lived with for the last twenty-five years. I manage my depression now with the help of regular medication and professional therapy a couple of years ago which enabled me to re-think the way I responded to depressive episodes in my life. For a very long time the incapacitating pain of depression was compounded by feelings of guilt that I should be feeling like this in the first place. What do you have to be unhappy about? I would ask myself. I'd badger myself with the things I should be thankful for and how so many people in the world had a much worse time of it than I did. My therapist helped me to break the cycle of adding to my depression by hating myself for daring to have it in the first place. I don’t need to work out why I feel the way I do. I just need to accept that I do and determine where to go from here.

So how does this link in to the other stuff, the kinky spanky BDSM preferences?

That has been a part of my life even longer than the depression has. Certainly from the age of nine I was maintaining a kind of mental scrapbook in which I would store snippets of books and films – like Oliver in the 1968 musical being bent over a table by Fagin his coat tails flipped out of the way for a beating he doesn’t receive, or an episode of Nanny in which three sisters are regularly hit across their palms with a ruler by their stern governess. I would snip and rearrange these images until I had something I liked and replay it again and again in my mind. I wasn’t sexually aware; I just knew it was something that I liked to think about.

As I got older and realised that my obsession was in fact sexual in nature, I naturally assumed I was some kind of freakish pervert. Most of my masturbation fantasies didn’t even involve sex. How weird was that? Then I found out about Sadomasochism. That must be what it is, I thought and, as the world wide web wasn’t around yet, sought out books and magazines full of whips, chains, leather masks and women being restrained in a  variety of unnatural and uncomfortable looking positions.  There was a horrible sense of disappointment when I realised that, no, that wasn’t right either.  I felt like I had I had missed another memo. I was weird even amongst the weirdoes. All I wanted to see was girls having their bottoms spanked.

Interestingly I feel that I have really only come to terms and fully accepted my kink with the last few years which coincides with my acceptance of my clinical depression.

Yet I still remain unconvinced that the two things are connected.

I don’t doubt that the two things often coincide. But then they would. Self harm is not uncommon. Neither is being a bit kinky. The two things are often going to turn up together in the same person. For me, they are just two separate things that make up who I am. Like my vegetarianism or love of Disney movies.

I am not dismissing the idea though. I may have turned forty this year but I am still learning all the time about what it means to be me. In fact, I anticipate it to be a life-long project. I understand – and like – myself better today than at any other point in my life so far. But I am very, very long way indeed from knowing it all. Maybe the dodgy bit of wiring inside my head that sparked the need to self-harm is linked to my fascination with spanking. Regardless of whether they are in fact two sides of the same coin as they were for Lee in Secretary, the most important thing I think is that I continue to accept myself as I am. Emotionally messy, slightly scarred and my own particular level of kinky. It’s all me.