Forty years on

Once again, it is time for the nichest of niche postings: the third in a series I am calling ‘The 1980s called’. Regular readers (those of them who haven’t already turned away in frustration, knowing there will be no colour images of sexy young ladies captioned to say cruel things), will recall this as the series in which Servitor self-indulgently reminisces about British femdom mags that few if any of you ever read, then proceeds to try to reproduce sections of his own, made-up version of something that has been superseded first by magazines with higher production values, then by digital media and the Internet. Oddly, most people don’t seem to regret that, so just possibly, Servitor, nobody wants this crap, hmm?

But it’s no use. I’m nothing if not stubborn: just ask my SO who frequently has to go to the trouble of clicking her fingers twice, or raising an eyebrow more than a milimetre to get me to do her bidding.

So, as is now traditional in this series, let me first feature a couple more covers from the real thing, the Vixen and Mistress magazines. I’ll remind you again you can buy complete scans of these from Swish Publications and it’s an incredibly good deal: you actually pay fewer £s per mag than you would have paid in 1985. Inflation? Not in our femdom.

Those were real, from here on it isn’t.

As before, the below are entirely made-up letters to an entirely made-up magazine called Empress, together with some modern photos made to look a bit like a 1980s magazine scan. Isn’t that just about the most pointless thing ever? But I don’t care.

Empress Vol 3, Issue 6. Letters to The Editrix

Most superior Goddess-Lady Lucia

Recently, my brilliantly creative wife extended these rules to include ‘codewords’ to be used when we can be overheard in public. She might, for example, say “Are you sure, darling?” which is a way of indicating that I have said something wrong and need to correct myself. If her response is “Are you quite sure, darling?”, then I have said something quite offensive and impertinent and proper correction is sure to be applied later, in private!

I wonder whether other couples have a similar system. Perhaps there are more of us than some people think! When next, at any dinner party, you hear a wife smilingly remark to her husband “We should go home soon, darling: so we can sort out those things in the attic”, just look closely to see if he goes pale! I would, as the only thing to be sorted out in the attic is my attitude. If she adds that we ought to be sorting out “Those things Aunt Susan gave us” I might even have to suppress a shudder, as ‘Aunt Susan’ is about three feet long and made of whippy rattan.

Anyway, Goddess-Lady Lucia, I must dash because it’s almost time to “do the weekly household accounts” and I fear this week those accounts might take a lot of balancing!

Respectfully

A devoted husband

Your ruler’s system sounds quite practical, devoted husband, although a little over-complicated for me. I hide nothing about my relationships and any male given the privilege of accompanying me in public can expect his status to be made perfectly clear to anyone in earshot, as the sound of a good hard slap to the face can carry a long way. I do approve of warning slaves well in advance of particularly severe punishments, however, as I enjoy watching them squirm. It would be delicious if your generous wife were to inform you early in the evening about a later encounter with Aunt Susan, to give you a few hours of dread while trying to keep up appearances in company. G-L. L.

To the exalted Editor-in-Chief

Another magnificent edition, thank you Goddess-Lady Lucia.

I particularly enjoyed the story entitled Adult Education as the ‘classroom’ scene has always fascinated me. With the greatest respect, however, I wondered whether something had gone wrong in the editing process, as on the second page of the story our protagonist receives the cane for mistakes in his algebra test – a test he only takes on the third page! Was this intentional; implying that Headmistress Burroughs could simply anticipate his hopeless performance and apply correction ‘in advance’ so to speak?

Yours in confusion

Jenkins minor, Guildford.

To my esteemed sister in dominance

I am greatly enjoying the series Maid to Command as I have always taken particular pleasure in imposing the arduous lifestyle of a Victorian housemaid upon arrogant males. My husband inadvertently – and I suspect to his regret – introduced me to this hobby, through his sexual interest in frilly, lacey and submissive feminine dress. Such foolishness can and should be exploited and after a brief period of indulging his desires, I briskly moved things on. Today he wears a simple and practical uniform, as do two younger males whom I have also taken into service. Quite a few males have an interest in occasionally flouncing around in a frilly or rubber simulacrum of a French maid outfit but I find few who are prepared to suffer the real thing – or rather, enough of the real thing for them to be beyond the point of turning back. For that to happen, I find they need to be subjected to three important disciplines: if I can impose those, complete control is assured.

The first is submission to proper, painful chastisement. When assessing a potential recruit, I sooner or later put him across my lap for a firm hand-spanking. No implement is required: I am a large and powerful lady, with hard hands, and by God I can spank any man to tears. Held firmly in place with one hand in the small of his back, a male over my lap expecting a sexy foreplay spanking will be sorely – very sorely – disappointed. I do use other implements, but I pride myself on being able to inflict intolerable pain with my hands alone. Any male who submits to that twice, knowing what he is in for, is surely mine to do with as I please.

So the second discipline is rapidly imposed after the first proper spanking: chastity, of course. I control the pain, I control the pleasure. After perhaps an initial period to accustom the maid to the device, I quickly tighten up, limiting orgasms to a thoroughly impersonal three-monthly release, all the maids together to add to the humiliation. I never ‘reward’ with release. My husband will be 60 in two years’ time, at which point – I have informed him – that will be that as far as this particular aspect of his life is concerned.

Finally the third discipline, which I regret has not thus far appeared in Maid to Command, Madame Editrix: tight corseting. If there is one enduring symbol of the centuries of male domination over women it is the way our bodies were forced uncomfortably to conform to an ‘idealised’ female shape. Well, no more. I am a large lady, as I said, and I see no reason to constrain my natural girth. For my maids, however, it is different: their lives are shaped by my wishes and, thus, so will be their bodies. If in history females were corseted primarily for looks, with the discomfort as a side-effect, for my subjugated males it is the opposite: discomfort is the objective.

I particularly look forward to a new maid’s first corseting. The garment I use looks reasonably feminine, in white with black laces and even some floral decoration. But it conceals ribs of steel, those white laces when pulled can, through their actions across multiple eye-holes, exert a tremendous constraining pressure and the ensemble is topped off with a buckle, fastened with a small padlock ensures no loosening. This latter is probably superfluous – the corseted maid cannot really reach behind to loosen the firmly-tied bow and his fellow maids would never dare to help him do so! But the ‘click’ of the lock removes any lingering hope of relief from the pressure and is thus effective in bringing home the difficulty of the situation.

Difficult it is. I pull the laces with all of my strength, working them over several times to create the maximum pressure. This finishes with my foot or knee in the small of the panicking maid’s back, extracting the last tenth of an inch of tightness. And by God it is tight. “Mistress, I can’t breathe!” they will squeak in panic. And they’re right: they can’t. Not until they learn the technique: shallow, frequent breaths from the chest, no expansion at all at the waist. But fast shallow breathing merely adds to the sense of panic – and panic they do. Most will pass out, some several times. It does them no harm. When unconscious, their panic will cease and they will take in enough oxygen to recover. When fully tightened they will be perpetually short of breath, which is an important element of the corseting. The maids’ stays are loosened just a little at night, then each day they initially have a few hours of merely uncomfortably tight rather than painfully tight corseting, before once again my strong arm and my boot in the small of their backs restores them to doll-like weakness. It involves considerable effort on my part, of course, but I love it.

So constrained, my maids cannot undertake any activity involving great exertion. They can still serve and undertake certain household tasks but anything involving heavy lifting must take place in the hours between to start of their day at 5.30 and my rising, typically around 10. After that, work is slow. Even before their corsets are tightened, short lengths of chain between their ankles and between their wrists create some inefficiency. You might wonder how the housework ever gets done? The answer is simple: each housemaid works a fourteen-hour shift and I have three of them. Even in the absence of any labour-saving devices (I haven’t the slightest interest in saving labour: the more of it there is for me to enjoy, the better), there is plenty of time for everything to be done in the most, repetitive tedious manner possible. So what if it takes a maid half an hour to iron one of my blouses and carry it carefully up to my wardrobe on the third floor, stopping every few steps carefully to recover her breath? To do six such blouses takes only three hours, leaving eleven hours left in the working day. I read somewhere that the unions in France are striking for a forty-hour week. My maids each work a ninety-eight hour week and they don’t get paid for it, the incentive being provided by my hand rather than my purse.

In conclusion, my dear, I encourage the author of Maid to Command to embrace corseting. A male placed in rigid physical control appreciates all the more the inflexible moral regime under which he serves. Generations of women forced into these appalling devices will applaud – and laugh, as you will laugh, at the sight of the corseted male in his perpetual discomfort.

Yours in sisterhood

Lady Maud

I suppose as Editrix I should add a note of caution at this point, for readers tempted to try corseting a male so tightly as to restrict his breathing. However, Lady Maud’s description of the suffering this causes is so appealing that I cannot bring myself to do so. Have at it, ladies: tug away. G-L. L.

Exalted Goddess-Lady Lucia

I just had to write to express my appreciation for the Birchwood Detention Centre series. Too often, the personalities and backgrounds of the ladies in disciplinary literature are barely sketched, if mentioned at all. Here, we appreciate the three young heroines as fully rounded characters from the very opening of the first instalment, with them as raw young cadets on the train to their assignment at Birchwood. As I child I read and loved the ‘jolly hockey sticks’ style of girls’ school story – how lovely to see it transposed into such a setting… ‘jolly rattan cane’ perhaps? But not so jolly for the male inmates!

How I felt Angela’s embarrassment at being greeted in such an over-familiar fashion by an inmate who had briefly been her boyfriend, and how we all cheered when she was given an opportunity alone with him in the punishment room to teach him about their new ‘relationship’ at the Centre! How very wise of Senior Section Officer Wallace to give her that opportunity even if a Trainee Junior Disciplinary Officer is not really supposed to be left alone with an inmate – a true leader knows when to bend the rules and when to enforce them rigidly. Oh – and poor Rosie, accidentally setting off the shock collars of every inmate on the block when she was learning how to use her remote punishment device! No real harm done, of course, but how we felt for her when she realised her mistake, face burning with embarrassment, after SDO Morris stormed in to find out why her work detail were all writhing on the floor in agony instead of carrying their loads of bricks! It was a sweet and tender scene when Julie comforted her afterwards in her quarters… I wondered whether perhaps it became later even more sweet and tender? There seems to be to be a strong undercurrent of lesbianism in several of the girls’ relationships but only hinted at, at least in the first two instalments. Will romances perhaps blossom?

Finally, I am sure all your readers are enthralled by little Clara’s storyline. At present, I have to say she seems rather a fish out of water, being so easily upset at the sight and sound of boys in pain. Will she be able to overcome her squeamishness, or might we say goodbye to her, perhaps last seeing her sitting sadly alone on the train, contemplating an uncertain future? I do so hope not, as she is such a determined little thing, even if she lacks innate brutality. Disappointed too, I imagine, would be SSO Ryder, whose interest in her seems rather ‘closer’ shall we say, than is strictly required for her training role. Again, without necessarily wishing to see an explicitly lesbian sex scene as such, it would be lovely if these ambiguities could be resolved with a loving embrace or even a full kiss…?

Yours agog

Slave to schoolgirls

I am pleased to receive such appreciation of the narrative elements of these stories; so many male readers’ missives essentially saying little other than ‘Whoa, nice tits!’. Indeed, character development is central to the Birchwood series and the author assures me that new characters will be introduced over time, along with new dilemmas bringing triumphs and disappointments for our three heroines, in true ‘school story’ style. I believe that in so implying Clara’s continued presence, I am not giving away too much, since, as you will read in this issue, an encounter with a rather unpleasant trio of lads when on an out-of-uniform visit to the nearby town awakens something inside her and she – well, I’ll write no more here, in case any readers have turned to this letters page before reading the latest instalment. Let’s just say that it was a life-changing experience both for her and – once the process of the law had worked its course – the three boys, who are likely to have the dubious pleasure of meeting her again, in a subsequent instalment.

I recognise in Clara a lot of women I have known, who came late to the realisation of how much they truly enjoy hurting males. I believe that at least half of all females have that potential inside them, whether the pleasure they will find is sexual or has a different aspect. But in our woefully male-led society, few develop it. I myself have been an enthusiastic persecutor of the male sex since childhood bullying days, but in so many others it is latent. I have a friend who horrified me by her lovey-dovey, indulgent attitude to the young man she eventually married, but I am so glad I did not cut all ties because one day something simply snapped and ‘hubby’ painfully learnt the consequences of presuming on a lady’s good nature. I visited them recently and observed with approval his nervous attention to her every casual word, the cane hanging so brazenly on a hook in the hallway leaving very little doubt as to what he feared!

As for the lesbianism, StS, it’s really none of your business. I know men fantasise about this, but the reality of female-only romances is far too complex for the brute emotions of males to comprehend, so any description of such a relationship in a magazine that out of commercial necessity is aimed mainly at a male readership, could only ever present the surface, obvious elements of a lesbian tryst. Lesbianism is not for provoking sexual arousal in males, only sexual frustration at the realisation that we can do quite nicely without male sexual activity (of which none is therefore required nor permitted).

Hmm. I have bestowed on you rather a longer reply than you deserve, StS. I order you to write another letter about Birchwood. This time, provide a long paragraph on each of the principal characters, avoid speculating about lesbian affairs that are not explicitly present (you may, therefore, refer to Rosie’s visit to SSO Ryder’s quarters, from the instalment in this issue of the magazine) and try to use proper punctuation. I had to edit the letter above, to make it readable and my time is incomparably more valuable than yours. G-L. L.

In the light of your insistence on males in your presence being naked, Goddess-Lady Lucia, I wonder if you have a view on the ideal length of the male penis? I have heard that some ladies do not like them too large?

Too much effort to add a line of respectful greeting or sign off your ‘letter’, boy? You don’t really deserve a reply, but I will just note that opinion is divided on the topic. Many ladies of my acquaintance – especially those of a lesbian persuasion – believe that the ideal size is ‘zero’ and some have devoted themselves to reducing the average towards that. Me, I like a man to have plenty of flesh there, as larger penises have more pain receptors in proportion. But if I decide a man would serve me better with less down there, I am quite prepared to follow the example of my sapphic sisters! G-L. L.

To the supreme Goddess-Lady Lucia

I am a submissive male who has the privilege occasionally of serving a superior lady in person. However, I cannot visit her as often as I would like, so she has taken to setting me time-consuming menial tasks, so I will think of her in the long gaps between visits.

I write lines, of course, hunched over my desk at home like a schoolboy, copying out endlessly some uplifting moral message, such as “My heart and soul belong to Mistress [X], at whose whim I am writing out this line five hundred times and who delights in setting a long sentence for this tedious task, regardless of whether the resulting absurd pile of words makes sense, the point merely being to ensure I spend my time in this repetitive task so befitting of my status.”

However, she has lately hit upon what she calls the ‘lottery game’. This was inspired by a game she invented for playing during our sessions, when she would scatter a pack of cards around a room and I would crawl around picking them up (sometimes with hands restrained). On one occasion, she told me that one card had been removed and that it was my task to identify it. Of course, a missing card cannot be identified until all the cards have been gathered, so I had to carefully sort them in to order once all had been gathered up.

When I was leaving her house after a later session, she handed me a plastic shopping bag. Inside was a mass of lottery tickets, of the sort sold in tear-off books for use at summer fete raffles and the like. They had indeed been torn off and simply filled the bag higgledy-piggledy, like waist paper. She informed me that they were from a book of 500 tickets and that at my next session I should report the number of the one she had removed.

Perhaps your readers can imagine what a tedious task this turned out to be. The 500 (or rather, 499) tickets had to be sorted into order, which took me several hours. The beauty of the system, of course, is that the dominant can perfectly accurately verify the amount of work her submissive put in with almost no effort – she simply had to take a ticket at random and note the number.

Since then she has varied the task occasionally. She almost always uses books of 1000 tickets, after I made the mistake of truthfully reporting how long it had taken me (she looked disappointed). She no longer tells me how many tickets she has taken – it could be two, three or four, or – and this caused me the most immense anxiety – none. Sometimes I am at ‘liberty’ to carry out my tedious task at any time in the interval between my visits to her (I usually try to deal with it fairly early, as it is horrible having the task hanging over me), on other occasions she might require an answer by telephone within 24 hours. On one occasion when I had done that, I was surprised and delighted to receive a package in the post a couple of days later – out of which fell, of course, another batch of lottery tickets.

All of this, of course, merely serves to remind me that my time is hers to command, and so I will take this opportunity to record my gratitude to my creative and thoughtful Mistress, for giving me so many hours of opportunity to spend my time in her service.

Her obedient servant

Timewaster

P.S.: My Mistress has just ordered me to copy out this letter several times. She has not yet informed me how many copies I will write, but I am to begin now and she will tell me when I have reached – or exceeded – the target she has decided upon. How silly of me to have written so much but that is my own fault for being such a tedious little man. This postscript was written under dictation.

I did indeed receive 30 copies of the letter above.

If Timewaster’s Mistress is reading this, she might care to note that there was a spelling mistake – regrettably repeated in each copy – that I have reproduced in the printed version above. Once he has found it for you, you might decide it is appropriate for him to write out a corrected version, or several. For my part, if I receive a written punishment that contains an error, I usually quadruple the required length or number of copies, but of course that is up to you, my dear. You might also have spotted that he describes telling you the truth as a ‘mistake’, which I found infuriating and I do not even know the wretched little man!

Nonetheless, the contemptible Timewaster’s letter has inspired my generous nature to provide a task to the absurd male creatures who make up the mindless majority of this magazine’s readership. How many times does the word ‘cane’ appear in this edition? Include all instances, whether in the main text, letters or advertisements but do not count any variants such as ‘canes’ or ‘caned’. The sub-editors have counted very carefully (they came to different totals the first time, so they did it again). Once you have counted, send your answer on a postcard clearly marked ‘I wasted my time at Goddess-Lady Lucia’s direction’ to the usual address. There are no prizes, of course, the opportunity to engage in a completely pointless task I commanded from you should be reward enough, along with the thrill you will get thinking of the contempt for you I will feel in the unlikely event that I bother to look at any of the postcards. Get on with it, scum. G-L. L.