The Library of Spanking Fiction: Wellred Weekly
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Articles
Items of interest regarding all things spanking
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Vil Du Ha Mer Ris? Norway is probably the only country where thousands of people are asked at dinner every day "Would you care for some more spanking" ("Vil du ha mer ris?"), and where most people are happy to accept. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that the country is full of happy spankos, but that we use the same word "ris" for spanking and rice. That "ris" means rice is no big surprise (compare French "riz" and German "Reis"), but that "ris" also means spanking needs an explanation. Originally, "ris" is the last part of the Norwegian word for birch rod, "bjerkeris", and the word just means a collection of twigs, "bjerkeris" = "birch twigs". In the old days, the birch was the standard implement for corporal punishment in Norwegian homes and schools, and gradually the word "ris" became the standard term for any kind of spanking. As "ris" also applies to twigs in nature (e.g. a dense growth of young birches), the word has a tendency to turn up in place names. Next time you visit Oslo, you may want to visit Ris School or Ris Church. To get there, just take Metro Line 1 to Ris Station (the next stop is called Slemdal which most modern Norwegian will automatically translate into "Naughty Valley", but unfortunately this interpretation is historically incorrect). As most Norwegians surnames are old farm names, the term "ris" can also be found as part of many family names. If you are interested in football, you may have come across John Arne Riise who has played with reasonable success in France, England and Italy. The Tradition Of The Birch Rod When you read older literature, you get the impression that there was a birch rod in all Norwegian homes, either on display to discourage unwanted behavior or more discreetly tucked away in a corner. "The birch behind the mirror" is still a standing expression in Norwegian, and refers to a hidden threat, something along the lines of: "If you don't behave yourself, you know what will happen...". It may, e.g., be applied to junior politicians who take their right to express personal opinions a little more literally than somebody supposed them to.  It is hard to tell how common birchings were in the old days, but we get a certain impression from the childhood memoirs of the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset (1882-1949). Undset, who is primarily known for her novels from medieval Norway, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1928, and was raised in a liberal and well-educated family (her father was a highly respected archeologist). Although Sigrid and her two sisters were reasonably well behaved, their parents still kept a birch rod behind the mirror in their bedroom, but when Sigrid was finally sent to fetch it, it was so dry that it fell to pieces almost before it may made contact with her backside. An English translation of her memoirs, The Longest Years, exists and may even be recommended to people with no interest in spanking - it gives a very vivid picture of how it is to be a child (as opposed to how it is to be an adult reminiscing about how it is to be a child).Another Norwegian writer who reflects the nation's obsession with the birch, is Margrethe Munthe (1860-1931), an elementary school teacher who wrote a vast number of songs for children. Many of the songs are quite moralistic, and the birch is seen as a natural consequence of naughtiness and disobedience. In the political climate of the 70s and 80s, these song were heavily criticized and their poor author was depicted as something of a moral monster although she only reflected the ideas of her time. The documentation we have, seem to indicate that Miss Munthe was a very popular teacher, much ahead of her time in many political and educational questions. But there are also school records which show that she did occasionally practice what she preached... I should add, perhaps, that corporal punishment in schools was abolished in 1936, and that corporal punishment by parents was made illegal in 1987 (until then, parents had an explicit right to punish their children within reasonable limits). Spankings In Literature And Film If we turn to fiction, I can remember a number of spanking references in the (even then) old books for children I read forty to fifty years ago. There are also several spanking scenes in the novels of Aksel Sandemose (1899-1965), arguably the best writer of his generation, but most of them are disturbing rather than erotic. The short story Av en født forbryters dagbok (From the Diary of a Born Criminal) by Sandemose's contemporary Johan Borgen (1902-79) is regularly studied in Norwegian high schools. It is told by a little boy (the born criminal) who thinks his grandfather is a stick (the old man is sick and lame, has retired to his room upstairs, and attracts attention by bumping his stick in the floor) and has an ardent desire finally to receive the spanking he has been threatened with for so long. The phrase "I want to get spanked" runs through the story almost like a refrain. At the end of the story, the boy has been spanked and is quite happy about it although it did hurt - in fact, "everybody was happy except Dad who was sad because he had to spank me". The story is not erotic in any sense, but must have struck a chord with many a teenage spanko. In 1966, a small publishing house brought out an anonymous, erotic novel Uten en tråd (Without a Stitch) by somebody they claimed was a "well-known author". The book was immediately banned as pornographic, and the author was identified as Jens Bjørneboe (1920-76), a respected and established author, but something of an enfant terrible. As with most banned books, the foreign editions outsold the author's more serious books and for a short while brought relief to Bjørneboe's strained finances.  Without a Stitch (bad as it is) has become something of a secret classic, a book that nobody reads, but everybody has read. From our point of view, it is mainly interesting due to two spanking scenes, both of some psychological interest. In the first scene, the heroine, a girl of nineteen, is spanked by her inexperienced boyfriend for her shameless sexual behavior, but it is clear that the real reason is a mixture of envy, male chauvinism and lack of self-confidence. The second scene is quite sad - in Hamburg, the heroine runs into a middle aged, outwardly successful business man who can only obtain sexual gratification by strapping her (and to some extent by getting strapped by her).In 1982, another novel with two spanking scenes appeared, but while Uten en tråd was at least partly a spoof and a parody, Knut Faldbakken's Bryllupsreisen (The Honeymoon) is a serious novel about the break-up of a marriage. The spanking scenes involve the narrators estranged and chronically unfaithful wife: In the first one, she tells how she at age eleven was caught watching her older brother masturbate and quite unfairly spanked by her father. She indicates that the experience created a link in her mind between spanking and sexual arousal, and in a later scene she invites her husband to spank her during a quarrel. He starts with a few tame swats, but when she insists that she deserves a "good hiding", he pulls the belt from her pants and gives her what she craves. The scene ends with a rather brutal anal penetration. The spanking scenes in Bryllupsreisen are quite interesting, although the psychology may seem rather simplistic to spankos. The cultural climate in 1982 was not the best for a serious discussion of female masochism; the book was flayed by the critics, and Faldbakken lost much of his standing as a young and promising writer. But he may have obtained a wider readership...  It was definitely more than the cultural climate that prevented the success of two films and one novel by director and writer Roar Skolmen. His two films, I ungdommens makt (1980) and Lucifer - sensommer gult og svart (1990), are both high on all lists of Norwegian Golden Turkeys, but they do show an intense interest in spanking. In the first one - a rather confused political(?) piece about a Christ-like youth leader (played by Skolmen himself!) - a male, middle aged school principal is caught by members of the Youth Movement and spanked bare bottom by his own students. I didn't find the scene very erotic the only time I saw it, thirty years ago, but others may be of a different opinion. Much more to my taste was another scene where some of the young people in the Movement play a game of "Truth and Dare" and where a very cute and innocent looking girl manages to earn herself a spanking. Unfortunately, she has the guts to walk out on the rest of the party...In Skolmen's second film, Lucifer, the penultimate scene shows the heroine setting the timer on her camera and then provoking a man into giving her a bare bottom spanking. In the last scene, we see the hero receiving an envelope with the photos and a note explaining that this is what he would have done had he been a real man. He sets sails (literally, he is in a boat on a little island off the Norwegian coast) and disappears into the horizon. The whole film is an erotic and intellectual battle between hero and heroine, but unfortunately it is so badly written and horribly acted that the heroine's hindquarters are the only things worth watching. Skolmen is a much better writer than director, and technically speaking his novel Den døende slaven (The Dying Slave, named after Michelangelo's sculpture) is not bad at all. Published in 1982 and dedicated to the young Werther (no less!), it is actually a defense of men's right (or was it duty?) to spank their female companions. The premise is a battle of the sexes (recall Lucifer) were both sexes should be allowed the full use of their own particular strengths. The female strengths seem to be charm, beauty, intuition and ingenuity, while men excel in courage and physical strength - one of the book's redeeming features is that intelligence seems to be evenly distributed. If we men are not to be totally overrun by our mates, we must use our courage and strength to give them the spankings they (secretly) crave and deserve. It takes the hero Georg 131 pages to get to the point were he actually spanks his beloved, and from then on it's downward all the way. Spanking spreads like an infectious disease on Bora-Bora (Skolmen obviously has a thing for islands), but some people don't like Georg's new occupation as a traveling spanking evangelist (yes, he does use his hands to cure), and finally he is spanked, buggered and murdered by two fellow tourists, leaving his beloved Andrée to wander among the columns of the Louvre philosophizing about love, spanking, art, and a lot of other things. The Norwegian Spanking Scene This ought to be a short chapter chapter as I don't really think Norway has a Spanking Scene! We do to a certain extent have a BDSM Scene, though, and I'll start there. SMil is a national organization for people interested in BDSM and organizes meetings and venues in most of the larger cities. They also run a large Internet site, but although this is the only natural meeting place online, my impression is that many spankos feel that they do not really fit in - the logic and emotions of spanking seem in many ways different from most other forms of BDSM. As a lot of people seem to consider SMil primarily a sex site, female members must routinely deal with aggressive, uncouth and uninvited messages from male members.  SMil's website has a quite extensive collection of BDSM stories (1800 by the latest count) and is the natural place to post if you want a big audience and some feedback. The administrators do, however, maintain a strict 18 year age limit, and hence all stories on this site labelled "t" or "c" would be immediately banned (unless you dress them up as ageplay as some suggest). I have posted most of my Norwegians stories on SMil and obtained some good friends that way, but the comments you receive on the site are mainly in the "Like!" or "Hot!" category, and not of much use. If you want to publish in a pure spanking environment, there is a large (about 500 stories) Swedish site for X/F and X/f stories, and a smaller site for (mainly) M/M stories. On these sites there are no facilities for comments and feedback, and posting there feels like throwing a stone into the ocean - you see it disappear, but have no idea what happens next.There have been some attempts to establish Norwegian spanking groups on Fetlife and Spankolife, but there does not seem to be sufficient interest to keep such groups going. A couple of years ago, there were quite a few spanking blogs around, but as far as I know only one such blog is reasonably active for the time being. Fortunately, "Miss Brat: Naughty Stories for Naughty girls" is an excellent blog with a serious main theme: How to be a spanko in a vanilla world and a vanilla relationship. Miss Brat writes good stories and has a fine eye for pictures matching her texts, but her main strength is an uncanny ability to catch arguments, situations and emotions in a few words. So what do Norwegians do when they are not satisfied with the Internet, but want some real action? The most common way is to meet through a website (usually SMil), and see if conversation leads somewhere. There are some traveling "disciplinarians" who take on clients (or whatever they are supposed to be called), and there are occasional "meetings" for smaller groups around themes such as old-fashioned upbringing, but in most cases progress depends on private initiative. And that is probably the best way? Concluding Remarks I have called this a personal essay for two reasons. The first is simply that I have chosen to write about what I know and find interesting - had you asked another Norwegian, he might have come up with something completely different. Obviously, there is no such thing as a Canon of Norwegian Spanking. The second reason is that I have chosen to spice up the text with personal comments, basically because that is the only way I could find to give some flavor to the description of books you have never read and films you have never seen. Hope you enjoyed it! 25 comments
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