You see, neither back in my first days of furtive spanking-porn-browsing, nor now, have I managed to extract a grain of pleasure out of watching the punishment sequences that have become Lupus’s trademark. The harshness of the floggings, the marks and the screams tend to be too much for me; the occasional trickle of blood makes me cringe. The action scenes are supposed to be the focal point of any spanking video, and yet – unless I’m writing a review of the film – I usually watch them on fast-forward. Even knowing what I know about the safety and consensuality of the shooting process – even having been there and experienced it for myself – I don’t expect ever to grow to enjoy the results.
And yet, my appreciation of Lupus films has never wavered.
The recurring themes of individuals pitched against the powers that be – the state, the parental authority, the grotesque educational figures – and losing, always losing – appeal to the dark side of my kink. The camp, over-the-top comedies feed my nostalgia for a particular brand of Eastern European humour. The occasional supernatural plot pleases my inner geek, while the historical dramas satisfy my various costume fetishes.
There is also plenty of kinky content peripheral to the beatings that I can still enjoy – all the kneeling, all the ritual cruelties inflicted on the fictional schoolgirls, maids and prisoners. Until the first stroke falls, I am enthralled.
I have come to see having to hit fast-forward when the caning starts as a fair price for the wealth of kinky pleasures I get from the rest of the film.
My decision to take a role in a Lupus movie has followed a similar logic.
I don’t process pain as pleasure. I knew my caning would hurt a great deal, possibly more than any of my previous experiences. I did briefly wonder whether, caught up in the moment, I would find pleasure in my real-life flogging in a way I couldn’t enjoy some other girl’s filmed experience – and, pre-empting an upcoming post on the topic, no, I didn’t get any enjoyment out of the pain until it was all over – but, on the whole, I was prepared for a thoroughly uncomfortable several minutes over the famous bench.
And that was OK, because I knew – from studying the films, and from talking to Niki Flynn, who’d gone to that scary place before – that the rest of the shoot would give me the sort of pleasures that would make a few minutes of acute pain worth going through. For somebody who has a separate fetish for artistic suffering, working with a production on the scale of Lupus’s would be worth every stroke.
I had never before worked to a script, and I’d get that. I had never had somebody else think through the costume and make-up for me –I’d get that too, and in the end even the hideous pieces of reformatory wardrobe would turn out charming in their appropriateness. I had never before taken detailed direction, or shot completely – and confusingly – out of sequence, or acted in sets built for the purpose in every small detail; in short, I had never been a part of a spanking shoot run on such a professional level – and I knew that all of these experiences were mine for the taking.
Of course there’s more.